“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.”