“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.”