No Quest For The Wicked

“Not necessarily immediately, but over time. And that won’t happen if Sylvester gets the brooch—and you can be assured that he won’t hand the Eye over to the wizards.”

“Maybe we’d better continue this discussion in another venue,” I suggested. “Someone may be following us.” Not to mention the fact that it was weird being with my boyfriend and my grandmother while surrounded by underwear. My grandmother was related to my mother, after all, which meant there was a strong possibility that at any moment she would suggest that I needed to pick up some nice things while I was there. Or worse, she’d ask me to explain a thong.

“In case we really are being followed, I suggest we take the escalator and spread out,” Rod said. “Even if one of us gets caught, the others could still have a chance to get away.”

Earl went down first to act as a scout. When he made it to the next floor below, Rod went. Thor and Granny followed after a group of shoppers went down. Although both Earl and Thor looked magically odd to me, I knew they were likely using magic to hide their nonhuman features from ordinary people. The other shoppers would only see a lanky kid and a little old man, even if I thought they looked incredibly odd riding an escalator.

As we waited for our turn to go down, Owen whispered to me, “We only have three tranquilizer darts.”

I saw what he meant. “And we’ve got four magic users with us. Does it work on elves and gnomes?”

“Jake said it worked on everyone. And I would suggest not mentioning the darts to our new friends.”

“And probably not Granny, either,” I said. “I don’t think she’d hurt me to make sure I couldn’t knock her out, but then we don’t know what she’d be like under the influence of the Eye.”

“At least we can be sure of each other,” he said with one of his shy smiles that made my heart go pitter-patter.

“Yeah, because I’d feel really bad if I had to dart you.”

We stepped onto the escalator for the long ride down. No one seemed to be following us, and it didn’t look like any of the other members of our party had been waylaid on their way down. As we got on the last escalator to head to the ground floor, I became more attentive. It occurred to me that maybe it would have been better to mix up the immunes and the magical people so there would have been someone to spot trouble and someone to deal with it, but I was so used to that being my partnership with Owen that I’d automatically teamed up with him.

When the ground floor came into view, I first saw Earl lurking near a display. Some dark suits milled around the floor at the foot of the escalator, but I couldn’t tell from this distance if they were security, staff, or customers. Granny and Thor were hard to spot, since everyone else was so much taller than they were. It took me a while to find Rod, but when I did he was walking right past a throng of the black-suited men without drawing any attention. It looked like we were in the clear.

I glanced at the escalator steps to time my step off. Once I was on solid ground, I looked up and saw a wall of black suits closing in on us. “Uh oh,” Owen muttered, and I knew he’d noticed them, too. “Act normal,” he whispered, taking my hand. I clutched it desperately as he led me right to the black-suited people.

They didn’t do anything as we approached and then walked past them. They didn’t tell us to stop, didn’t try to stop us, didn’t grab us. All they did was fall into step behind us and follow us toward the exit. They didn’t do it in an obvious, obtrusive way, though. If I hadn’t been paranoid about store security and being followed, I wouldn’t have noticed them at all. They seemed to just be going along with the flow of the crowd from the escalator toward the exit.

“I think they’re watching us,” I whispered to Owen.

“Let’s find out.” He tugged on my hand, pulling me toward a display. “Hey, look at this,” he said more loudly.

Even while I pretended to look at whatever Owen was showing me, I saw out of the corner of my eye that the people in black had gone back to milling around. “What are they up to?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Something seems off.”

“Magic off or other off?”

“I’m not sensing magic.”

“That’s good, right? If wizards are watching us, it probably has something to do with the quest, and then we’ve got problems.”

“Yeah, we’re running out of room on the team. We’ve already got too many for the flying carpet or your average restaurant table.”