Kiss and Spell

“So, when I get off duty, are you up for going to a different part of the neighborhood for dinner?”

“Come get me when you’re ready. The nice thing about owning what amounts to an imaginary bookstore is that I only have to sort of look like I’m bothering to run it.”

“Now I’ll go sell some more imaginary coffee and keep your imaginary bookstore in business one more day.”

I really did have to wonder why they’d bothered creating a fake neighborhood to house the prisoners in. If they’d just taken us to another world reachable only by portal, we still wouldn’t have been able to escape. Was it that important to keep us from even wanting to get away? I supposed it might be, now that I thought about it. If all your prisoners had magical powers, you’d want to keep them from using those powers, and it might have been more difficult to do that for so many people than to create a fake nonmagical paradise.

Besides, once they were through with it, they could always lease it to filmmakers as a setting for cheap romantic comedies.

*

It was difficult to find a place to explore that we hadn’t visited already, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to find one person in this entire neighborhood, no matter how confined it seemed. Still, it was a finite place, and there couldn’t have been that many real people there.

“I know the best way to find him,” I quipped to Owen. “I just need to develop a raging crush on him and then dash out to the corner store with no makeup on, my hair under a ball cap, and wearing a stained old T-shirt. Then I could guarantee I’d run into him.”

“You think that would work?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It worked often enough in the real New York, which is much bigger. In fact, it never fails.”

“Do you think you can stir up a crush that easily?”

“That would be the difficult part, considering I’ve only met him twice, other than the one time here. He hasn’t given me much to work with, alas.”

Then I thought I saw a familiar figure ahead of us and clutched Owen’s upper arm hard enough to cut off circulation. “Speak of the devil!” I breathed.

“I think you’re right,” Owen said, and we followed him. There were enough people on the sidewalks that we were able to blend into the crowd, and Dan didn’t seem to notice he had a tail. I wasn’t sure how long that would last, though. If Dan’s persona in this world retained even a tiny bit of his security staff instincts, he’d be on to us in a heartbeat.

“How can we approach him?” I asked Owen. “We don’t know him here. Everyone else, we’ve had a reason to talk to them, and Mac at least had regular habits. This may be our one chance.”

“You said he was a customer.”

“I made him one latte. If I recognize him in public and try to talk to him, I’ll look like a scary stalker.”

We followed him to a coffee shop, where he entered and took a seat at the counter. I started to head inside, but Owen held me back. “Maybe what we need to do is find a stranger he’ll want to talk to.”

“Should we go get Perdita?”

“I was thinking more about you.”

“Me? But if he saw me, he’d think I was a crazy stalker, remember?”

“Do you think you’ve got enough magic left to pull off that illusion again? Your bombshell may not be quite my type, but I’m guessing it’s his.”

“It’s worth a try. But we’d better find a phone booth for me to change in because it might attract notice if I changed here.”

We hurried around the corner and found a niche under a building’s front steps. There, I closed my eyes and concentrated on the spell, dredging up every last bit of power I had. I opened my eyes when I felt an additional surge and saw Owen holding my hand. “I thought I’d see if that would help,” he said. “It seems to have worked.”

“But, let me guess, it wouldn’t work like that to maintain my power all the time.”

“No, sorry. You’ll lose the power as soon as I drop the connection. It’s more like a power cord than a battery.”

“Will I be able to maintain the illusion?”

“Creating it takes more power, but you will have to stay focused on it.”

“How do I look?”

“Like someone he’d want to talk to.”

I remembered Rod’s lesson about maintaining the persona and the attitude as I walked down the street with Owen a few paces behind me. I wasn’t the sort of woman who got a lot of looks, even when I passed construction sites, but now I was turning heads. The fact that a lot of those heads were probably mere illusion didn’t make it less thrilling. The more people looked at me, the easier it was to keep my head held high and my hips swiveling.