Merlin spoke fervently about the importance of using magic for good, and the crowd was totally with him. I felt like I was at an old-fashioned tent revival. I barely kept myself from shouting, “Amen!”
Then Merlin said, “You’re probably aware of our competition by now, and there are some things you should know about that company. The man who has served as the face of Spellworks has rejoined MSI, and he can tell you more about what their magical methods really mean. I am pleased to welcome Mr. Phelan Idris.”
That brought murmurs of surprise and some tentative applause. Someone had really managed to clean Idris up. He almost looked respectable in a nice suit. It may have been the first time I’d ever seen him in clothes that actually fit him. I held my breath as he started talking. “I’m a big one for fun and, let’s face it, mischief,” he began, and I relaxed as I recognized the opening line of the speech I’d written for him. “That was the reason I left MSI. I was creating spells that caused trouble, and those spells were the foundation for Spellworks.”
He was no orator. He sounded stiff and like he was reciting from memory, which he was, but at least he was more or less on script. “It does seem like every generation has someone rise up to challenge the status quo,” he went on, and that wasn’t in the script. I held my breath again. “I guess I was this generation’s one.” His smirk indicated that he was proud of that, and that worried me. “I’m not old enough to remember it, but some of you probably remember the last time we went through this, only it was a lot worse when the Morgans tried to take over the magical world. They used magic—raw power—to stop anyone who got in their way, and it took a lot of raw power to bring them down.”
Merlin, who’d taken a seat on stage during Idris’s speech, rose slowly to his feet when Idris went off-script, but he hesitated. Anything that looked like censorship at this point was bound to backfire. I had no idea what was coming, but my heart pounded in anticipation.
“What were their names? I think it was something like Kane and Mina. Yeah, that’s it, Kane and Mina. They were pretty young, even younger than I am now. Maybe that’s a phase particularly powerful wizards go through.” He smirked again and shrugged, like he was including himself in that group. “But the good guys destroyed the bad guys, and all was right with the world. There was just one loose end. One very tiny loose end. Like, a baby they left behind. Just think about the power that kid might have, with those parents, and with the amount of power Mina was channeling while she was pregnant. Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to that kid?”