“Miss, what seems to be the problem?” the guard asked.
“This–this freak just exposed himself to me!” Gemma sputtered in righteous indignation.
“Sir, we can’t have behavior like that up here. I’ll have to ask you to leave,” the guard said.
Sleepless put up a protest, but that only made the guard more stern, and he grabbed the guy roughly by the upper arm to haul him away. Soon, the guard released him and backed off, rubbing his hand like he’d been zapped. I tried to think of something to do, then remembered that I had a wizard on hold. “Owen, our supposed cyber dater is using magic to keep the security guard from taking him away,” I whispered. “What do I do?”
“Is the way clear to the transmitter?”
“For a moment, yeah.”
“Get over there. He can’t do anything to you while guards are around.”
I moved as quickly as possible toward the transmitter while Marcia blocked me from view. The security guard had called for reinforcements, so Sleepless was busy for a moment. After another angry outburst, Gemma joined Marcia. “Okay, I’m there,” I said to Owen.
“Now, see if you can open it,” he instructed.
I got out my Swiss Army knife and pried open the cover, then as soon as I did, I gasped in pain and had to pull my necklace off and drop it in my purse. “There’s some serious magic coming off this thing,” I said.
“Then that’s definitely what we’re looking for. Turn the tuner until it stays on five when it’s close to the box.” I did what he said, then he told me, “Now, turn the radio on and tape it to the inside of the door. Will it fit when you close it?”
“It should.”
“And what’s that sound? Is it singing? It’s terrible.”
“Gemma and Marcia are singing ‘New York, New York.’ I think their theory is that it’s so embarrassing that no one will come over here. Sleepless can’t come back, either—even if he’s escaped from the guards.”
“That’s actually pretty clever.”
“I’ll tell them you said so.” I ripped off a strip of duct tape and secured the transistor radio to the inside of the metal box, then closed the lid and stood up. “Mission accomplished,” I reported to Owen.
“Good work. Are they still singing?”
“Yeah. And everyone on the observation deck is studiously ignoring them.”
“Make them stop and then get out of there before that guy does something.”
“I don’t see him.” Gemma and Marcia finished their song with a flourish and a couple of high kicks, then I asked, “Are you two quite finished?”
They turned around. “Are you?” Marcia asked.
“Ages ago.” I walked past them toward the elevators. “Honestly, I can’t take you two anywhere.”
Once we were out of the building and heading home, Gemma said with a groan, “I may never be able to show my face around that building again.”
“You were brilliant,” I assured her.
Gemma and Marcia were still rehashing their adventures when we got back to our building, so they didn’t notice the young Indian woman leaning against the wall beside the front steps. She jumped up when she saw us coming. “Surprise!” she said.
Chapter Twelve
It was my best friend from high school, Nita Patel, who had been working at her family’s motel in our hometown the last time I saw her. “Nita!” I blurted before my brain could think of anything more diplomatic to say. “What are you doing here?”
“I got a job at a hotel here in New York! Isn’t that great?” she said.
“Wow, yeah, that is great!” I said, fighting to sound enthusiastic as I stepped forward to hug her, even while I was inwardly groaning at the remarkably bad timing. I was glad to see my friend, but she wasn’t in on the magical secret and that could make things complicated. Then I remembered my manners. “You remember Gemma and Marcia, don’t you?”
“Of course! Hi!”
“Hi!” they chorused.
Nita clapped her hands in glee. “I can’t believe I’m really here!”
“How long have you been here?”
“I got in this afternoon. I guess I should have called you, but I wanted to surprise you. I said I was getting out of that town, and now I have!”
“Why don’t we go inside to talk?” Gemma suggested.
“Yes, of course,” I said, stepping up to unlock the front door. “Come on up.” I led the way up to our apartment and ushered Nita inside.
I could see her trying to keep the dismay off her face. “Wow, it’s, well, um, cozy,” she managed.
“It’s a lot bigger than where we used to live,” Marcia said.
Nita’s eyebrows raised. “This is bigger?”
I patted her on the shoulder. “I told you, it’s not nearly as glamorous as on TV. This is the way real people live.”
“At least we all have actual bedrooms now,” Marcia said, sitting on the sofa. “I used to sleep on a sofa bed in the living room.”
Nita nodded. “The hotel rooms here are half the size as in our motel, and they charge about six times as much for them. If we could move our motel here, we’d make a fortune.”
Gemma sat on the sofa and gestured for Nita to join her. I dragged a dining chair over to join the group. “What did your parents say?” I asked as I sat.
Nita shrugged. “I have no idea. I left them a note. My brother took me to the bus depot, and he gave me a job reference. I’m lucky that the woman who hired me is also Indian, so she knew all about escaping the family business.”
My stomach dropped. “You moved to New York without telling your parents?”
“They’d never have let me come. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?”
“That’s always worked for me,” Gemma said with a laugh.
Nita grinned at Gemma and crossed her legs. “I figure they’ll come around when I remind them that I’ve now significantly increased my chances of meeting a nice Indian boy I could marry. You don’t know any Indian men, do you? I hear you’re quite the matchmaker.”
“I’ll see what I can find for you,” Gemma promised.
“Have you found a place to stay?” Marcia asked.
I was pretty sure where Marcia was going, and I knew she thought she was doing me a favor, but I wished I could think of a way to signal her to shut up.
“I haven’t started looking,” Nita answered.
“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.”
“It wasn’t the beads. You’d have been better anyway.”
She frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s what I spent my weekend dealing with. Now we need to get a look at those beads. Could I borrow yours?”
She wrapped her fingers around her necklace, then hesitated. “I don’t want to get sick again.”
“You won’t. In fact, you’re probably more likely to get sick if you have that on. They come from Spellworks, you know.”
Her slanted eyebrows rose even higher. “Really? Mom didn’t say that.” She pulled the beads over her head and handed them to me. I took them and headed straight to Owen’s lab.
“I’ve got something for you,” I called out as I entered. He looked up from where he was leaning over a table, peering at something that I soon saw was another set of the beads. “Oh, never mind.”
“Jake had a set.”
“I got them because I knew you’d want to analyze them,” Jake said defensively. “I never believed they were a cure.”
“Are they a cure?” I asked.
“They would counteract the spell,” Owen said. “But there’s something else there.” He gestured toward the line of Spellworks charms he’d been analyzing. “Even though each of these is supposed to protect against a different kind of spell, there’s a bit of magic that shows up in all of them. It was so minor I missed it in the charms, but it’s strong enough in these amulets to be obvious, and once I knew what I was looking for, I found it in the charms. Now I need to isolate it and figure out what it is. I’m certain that’s the important part—the reason they’ve created the situations to make people want to buy these.”
I leaned on the table and watched as he held his hands above the various charms. “They must have a timetable—something big planned that needs as many people as possible to have these things,” I mused out loud. “That would be the reason for the flu. It affected absolutely everyone who’s magical, even inside MSI. Before, probably only people who’d been directly affected by the magical crime or who were prone to paranoia would have bought protective charms. This way, they get a lot more people, all at once.”
Owen frowned, closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “I think there’s a conduit here. It’s hard to tell because nothing’s being transmitted right now.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.