Magic Unmasked

  So much for that attempt. I fumbled for the right thing to say. “No, it’s okay. I can keep at it a little longer. Do you have anything else for me?”

  I got more of his attention then, but not with a smile or positive. He peered at me through his glasses. “Are you sure? It’ll be five soon. Most of the staff will be heading home too.”

  And most of them probably had family to keep them company when they did get home. I shrugged. “I don’t mind. It’s good experience for college applications, right?”

  Dad’s brow knit, but he nodded. “Well, here, I do have another set of soil sample data.”

  You asked for this, I reminded myself as I schlepped the new stack over to the computer desk.

  Diving in, I started to hum to myself—softly, but enough to drown out the electronic whine. My foot bobbed up and down in time. I’d just gotten into my own zone of concentration when the screen in front of me fritzed.

  The data fragmented into a spray of pixels. Crap. I grimaced at the monitor. When it came to electronic equipment, I seemed to be cursed. I was lucky this was the first time the computer had crashed on me today.

  At least I knew how to fix that on my own now. I followed the steps Cheryl had showed me when the same thing had happened on my first day: Turn it off, wait fifteen seconds, turn it back on again, wait for the hard drive to reboot.

  Once it was running again, it took me about a half hour to get through the rest of the reports. When I’d added the last to the finished pile, I leaned back and stretched my shoulders.

  “Dad,” I started, spinning my chair toward him.

  My mouth snapped shut. His chair was empty. Everyone who’d been in the lab was gone. Some must have left for the day, and Dad must have gone off with the others to that meeting he’d mentioned.

  He could at least have given me a heads-up.

  I set the files on his table with the others and went out to the office’s reception area to see if anyone had stuck around. Nope. The front desk was vacant, no one else in sight.

  I was about to call it a night when the door eased open.

  A guy stepped inside. He looked to be about my age, tall and lean but not skinny, wearing a dress shirt and slacks that made me wonder if he went to some kind of private school. His tawny hair was swept to one side over his high forehead, his posture straight and assured. Kind of a cute guy, if I was being honest.

  He flashed a smile at me, and I revised that opinion with a skip of my pulse. Really cute. What the heck was he doing here?

  “Oh, good. I’m not too late,” he said.

  I lifted my chin with what I hoped was a professional expression. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Yes, actually—this is the Bosworth Geological Center, isn’t it?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what it says on the door,” I said automatically. Okay, there went professionalism out the window.

  The guy glanced at the door and chuckled to himself. “Never hurts to confirm. Ah, do you… work here?”

  A dip of his gaze took in my sweatshirt and jeans. His expression stayed mild, but a prickle of self-consciousness ran over my skin. The sweatshirt had a little glitter on it that fancied it up, but, let’s be real, it wasn’t the most business-like apparel ever. The way this guy was dressed, he looked more like he should be working here than I did.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m volunteering. My dad works here. He’s a geophysicist. If there’s something you need to know about the company, I can probably give you the answer. If it gets too technical, I can pass the question on to my dad.”

  How technical a geological question would some high school guy have anyway?

  The guy seemed to consider. “Well… I’m collecting information on any recent major earthquakes worldwide that have given cause for concern.”

  He didn’t have an accent exactly, but there was something about the way he talked—a slight affectation or the formal phrasing—that almost sounded like one. As if he’d stepped out of some alternate place or time. Weird. But it got me curious too. Enough that instead of letting him go and heading home myself, I kept talking.

  “I don’t remember any of the scientists mentioning a major earthquake since I started here a few weeks ago. But then, they mostly focus on this region of the US—not a whole lot of tectonic activity in New England, you know? If there’d been anything really big internationally, it’d have come up, though.”

  He frowned, as if he’d really wanted there to be some catastrophic earthquake for me to tell him about. “There must be something. Possibly it wasn’t that big?”

  I held up my hands. “Sorry, I’m not sure what to tell you. Why are you asking, anyway? Are you, like, a geological private eye or something?”

  It was kind of a lame joke, but it got me another smile. “Something like that,” he said with a mysterious air. It wasn’t just the weirdness—or the cuteness—that made me want to keep talking to him. He gave off an impression of total confidence, as if he didn’t even care that I probably thought he was weird. An unshakeable sense of purpose.

  I wished I had a little more of that.

  “Is there any way I could speak to one of the scientists?” he asked, still smiling. “I promise I’ll keep the interrogation quick.”

  I made a face. “They’re in a meeting right now. I can check when the best time for you to drop by again would be—I guess it’d have to be after school hours?”

  “Ideally after four-thirty. But I can work around that restriction if necessary.”

  He was going to skip classes just to get this question answered? Okay then. I leaned over the reception desk and scanned the agenda Brenda had left open there. My lips moved automatically, turning the days of the week into a halting song under my breath to settle the buzz in my nerves. He was just some guy. I probably wouldn’t even see him again.

  My fingers drummed the page. A second later, the phone beside me jangled. I jumped and then paused before reaching for it, waiting.

  It stayed quiet. With a roll of my eyes, I turned back to the agenda.

  “What happened there?” The guy was suddenly close, right at the other side of the desk. When I glanced up, his eyes—pure dark blue, I could see at this range—held mine intently. As if I was suddenly his purpose. For a second, with a thump of my heart, I wasn’t sure I minded.

  “I, um, pardon?” I said, scrambling for words.

  “With the phone.” He pointed, still looking at me. His voice was quiet but just as intense as his gaze. “It rang and then stopped.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. It happens sometimes. Mechanical things like to act up when I’m around. I’m cursed or something.”

  I tried to grin at him, but he didn’t seem to find the idea of a curse funny. His eyes widened. “You—” He cut himself off. I could practically see him willing himself calmer, but a strange light had come into his face, even more determined than before. “What’s your name?”

  “Amy Sanders,” I said cautiously. This was getting a little too weird.

  “Sanders,” he repeated. “Hmm. Do you sing a lot?”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just curiosity. You seem like an interesting person, Amy Sanders.”

  I had the feeling someone had just swapped the script for this conversation without telling me. But his smile had come back, as brilliant as before, and while he was weird, nothing about him made me actually nervous.

  Was I interesting? How so?

  “Sometimes,” I found myself answering. “It helps me focus.”

  “Could you do it again?”

  I blinked at him. “What, sing?”

  He made an apologetic gesture. “For experiment’s sake. I promise I’m a good listener.”

  Was I really going to do this? He was looking at me like I wasn’t just kind of interesting but… special somehow. I didn’t have that great a voice.

  But I kind of wanted him to
keep looking at me like that.

  “Er, okay.” I dragged in a breath and gave him a couple lines from a song we’d been practicing in music class yesterday.

  “All right,” the guy said, sounding pleased, before I reached the chorus. “That’s good. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put you on the spot. Thank you for indulging me.”

  I still had no idea what was going on here, but he sounded so pleased it was hard not to feel a little thrill. “Was there… I mean, did you still want me to find a time to speak with the scientists?” I gestured to the agenda.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”

  I ran my hand down the page. “It looks like Thursday late afternoon is open. I could write you in, with your phone number if they want to call and—”

  “No phone number,” he broke in. “You can just put down ‘Jonathan.’”

  Jonathan—research questions, I wrote into the four-thirty spot.

  “Thank you,” he said. He hesitated for a second, his gaze fixed on me. Then he gave me one last smile and turned himself toward the door.

  I watched him walk out with a jab of disappointment. Somehow I’d thought something more momentous was going to come out of all of that encounter. No such luck. I was back to heading home alone and digging out a frozen pizza—Dad hadn’t even ended up giving me the money for Chinese. I picked up my bag where I’d set it on the floor.

  With a squeak of the hinges, Jonathan pushed open the door again. His face was slightly flushed.

  “Amy,” he said. “I’d like to see you again. Is there some time I could, ah, take you out, or…”

  He didn’t seem to know how to finish that question, just trailed off looking hopeful.

  My mouth opened and closed and opened again. “Like a date?” I blurted out.

  My cheeks warmed too, but Jonathan didn’t look offended by the bluntness. “I suppose,” he said. “I’d just like to get to know you better.”

  Wasn’t this what I’d wanted? At least seeing him would be something—something different.

  With someone who saw something fascinating in me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I don’t have any plans after school tomorrow.”

  He outright beamed at me. “Then tomorrow it is.”

  Chapter Three

  Jonathan

  The taxi driver gave me a bit of an odd look when I handed him his payment. I wasn’t sure if I’d accidentally tipped too much or too little. I had taken taxis around Manhattan before, even though Dad liked to drive and we had a chauffeur on call on top of that, because my parents believed in being familiar with the practical basics, but I hadn’t often enough that it was old hat.

  Before I could offer more, he bobbed his head with a “Thanks, kid,” and motioned me out. I supposed that meant I hadn’t done too badly.

  Amy’s high school, on the west side of the park from where I lived, was an unimposing brown brick building—Dull in every sense of the word. But as I stood at the edge front walk, waiting for classes to let out, a jitter of excitement ran through me.

  The girl I was waiting for was about as far from Dull as Odysseus had sailed from home. And she didn’t even know it.

  The doors parted to emit a stream of students. I stood to the side of the lawn as they poured past me. My gaze caught on Amy’s bright red hair a second before she split off from the crowd.

  She smiled when she saw me, her fingers curling around the strap of her backpack. I tapped my thumb against my thigh as she approached, casting a subtle rhythm into the air to judge her mood.

  Both excited and nervous. Hmm. I’d tried to hide my surprise yesterday, but perhaps I hadn’t managed well enough. Or possibly I’d made some magicless faux pas. It had probably been rather forward of me to suggest this meet-up at all. Hopefully I could convert a lot of her nervousness over to the excitement side of the equation.

  “Where are we off to?” Amy asked. Her cheeks had turned rosy under their smattering of freckles.

  “There’s a café a couple blocks over,” I said. I’d scouted the area from the window of the cab. “We could get a bite to eat.”

  “Sure.”

  She glanced over at me as we started walking. Her hazel eyes had looked brown yesterday, but today they seemed to have turned green to match her blouse. “So what do you do when you’re not playing geological detective?”

  “I’ll have you know there’s nothing playful about geological investigations,” I said in a mock-serious tone, and she laughed, but for a second my mind scrambled. I’d asked to see her to find out more about her, but of course she was curious about me too. Only there were restrictions on how much I could tell her yet. “Well, I go to school. See friends. Read books. The usual things.”

  Usual other than I meant a school of magic, mage friends, and, quite often, magical books. A little apprehension of my own tickled over me. I wasn’t sure how Dad would have reacted if he’d known what I was doing, but no doubt if I’d gone to him first, he’d have turned to higher authorities for approval of whatever happened next. And I didn’t trust mages like Uncle Raymond to consider what was best for anyone but themselves.

  I hadn’t even decided what exactly I was going to do here. I needed to know more first. And then… The rules about keeping our magic hidden shouldn’t apply around someone who could already hearken magic in her own right, really. If I told Amy, I wouldn’t be telling her about me, I’d be telling her about her. What was wrong with that? This situation was so rare I wasn’t aware of any explicit policies.

  On the other hand, I was relatively certain that if Uncle Raymond had known I was here, he’d have killed me.

  “And you like music,” Amy said with a slight arch of her eyebrow.

  I spread my hands. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Favorite band?”

  “Supertramp,” I said automatically, and then peeked sideways at her. Their last album had hit it off with some of my classmates, but I wasn’t sure whether it was what the magicless teens were listening to.

  Amy grinned. She was… awfully pretty when she grinned, I couldn’t help noticing. “Good choice. You must be all right.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to pick just one. I’ve been getting into Donna Summer. And Pink Floyd has some pretty cool stuff. And I like the stuff from musicals—Grease and Chicago and all those.”

  It made sense that she’d love music even if she didn’t realize how she could use it. I considered what to ask next as we arrived at the café. The spring day was warm enough for us to sit at one of the wrought-iron tables on the patio out front. Amy picked up the ribbon-bound menu as if she were afraid of getting fingerprints on it.

  “I, um, was assuming we’d just go to Dunkin’ Donuts or something.”

  She said it with a smile, but I didn’t need magic to read the anxiety underneath her remark. My mistake. I should have picked somewhere more casual. This was about as close to slumming it as my family got in the city, but obviously my norms weren’t hers.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Get whatever looks good to you. My treat.”

  I ordered a coffee and a slice of peach pie, and Amy, after a short deliberation that involved a significant amount of lip biting, asked for the same drink and a piece of raspberry cheesecake.

  “I feel like such a rebel,” she said, leaning her elbows on the table with a quirk of her lips. “My dad has a strict ‘no coffee until you’re eighteen’ rule. But I’m pretty sure one cup isn’t going to stunt my brain.”

  “I have about one a week and I don’t think it’s hurt mine any,” I said. “Although maybe I should let you judge that.”

  “So far so good. I take it your folks aren’t as uptight?”

  “No. At least not about my drinking habits.” I also had the occasional glass of wine when the moment fit. Not that I’d developed much of a taste for the stuff. But it wasn’t me we were meant to be talking about. “Your school is pretty close to you
r dad’s office. Do you live around here too?”

  She nodded. “Our apartment is just south of here. It’s not the nicest place ever, but my dad kind of had to scramble when he got the job offer. Maybe after we’ve been here a whole year we’ll move. At least it’s not as scary as some of the areas past the park.”

  So she was new in town. “Where did you move from?” I asked. I’d checked to make sure there weren’t any Sanderses I hadn’t thought of in the network of mages, but there could have been a name change along the way. Location would help me double-check.

  “Cincinnati,” Amy said. “I grew up there.” Her eyes clouded for a moment.

  I hesitated, wondering if it was a good idea to pursue this line of inquiry. “It must have been hard moving, in that case. Leaving behind friends and all. I’ve lived here all my life, so I can’t really imagine it.” And even if I did move somewhere else permanently, there’d always be the tight-knit community of mages there to welcome me.

  “Yeah, you know, it was pretty hard. The idea was to get a change in scenery.” Amy’s mouth slanted. “See… my parents got divorced last year. Mom met some guy who was only, like, five years older than me and decided she needed to ‘find herself’ by taking off to Honduras or Ecuador or someplace. It really shook up my dad, of course. So maybe it was better getting away from all the memories there.”

  She rattled off that account matter-of-factly, but the tensing of her jaw told me a different story. Losing her mom had shaken her up plenty too. Sympathy resonated inside me.

  “That sucks,” I said. Not the most elegant way of putting it, but it felt honest.

  The corner of her mouth twitched upward again. “It does. But we’re moving forward. Anyway, I shouldn’t be laying all my family’s dirty laundry on you.” A glint lit in her eyes. “I think you’d better tell me some of yours. Just so I feel better about it, you know.”

  The waitress came by with our food. Amy let out a pleased sound and dug in. I couldn’t help smiling as I reached for my fork.

  I’d never really talked to anyone like her before. None of my classmates would have dared to reveal that much about their family’s troubles in casual conversation. Or chattered so easily about her feelings about the neighborhood. A lot of them were so doggedly focused on their studies they barely mentioned anything outside that, and the others were busy making sure no one forgot their family’s status. And with my grandfather being in the Circle, they were especially careful how they acted around me.