Chapter Two

Dani

Four Weeks Later

Dani glanced the others’ way for a moment, lifted her index finger from her tea glass to indicate she had something, and returned her attention out the window, peering over the tops of her reading glasses. All three at their table caught her minuscule gesture, and she hoped Marvin interpreted it as a need for a diversion.

As she sipped her tea, she studied the building across the quad—Building Z—just in time to see two men in white one-piece biohazard suits get into the white truck that was always parked near the lower entrance of the building. This hadn’t happened since the day she applied to the school. As she watched, the truck pulled out of the Z’s parking lot.

She wanted to walk over to the window to see where it went, but too much attention to the outside was frowned upon, so she sipped and watched, ignoring her tablemates, as if she was fascinated by the birds at the bird feeder.

The white truck passed in front of the window and, as she watched, a garage-type door rolled up in the dorm building, the dormitory where all the inmates lived. The truck entered. The garage door closed. Her heart rate sped. Finally. After four, lousy, unproductive weeks undercover, something was happening. She glanced at Marvin and gave him a very tiny nod.

“I fucking hate magic school,” Marvin groused, deliberately too loud. “And the fucking meatloaf in the fucking dining room is the worst part of fucking magic school.” His voice grew louder with each complaint, his white beard waggling and his face turning red.

Yes, Dani thought. His cussing was proof that he had caught on. The others at the table jumped in too.

Sandra, the third at their table and the accountant in their magical investigation firm, pursed her lips and swatted the back of his head with her Christian magazine. “Watch your language, you foul mouthed, pasty old geezer.”

Marvin ducked, chortled, and added, loudly enough to be heard at the other tables, “Okay, okay! I’ll be nice. Though I’d hate it less if it was magic fucking school. Get it? Magic fucking school? That would be golden.” He waggled his long white eyebrows at his table-mates, lifted his mug in a silent cheer to his own word play, and guzzled his coffee and bourbon.

Dani managed not to sigh. Marvin’s undercover persona was the loud, obnoxious, ladies’ man who cussed like a sailor—which he had been in his real life youth. On covert investigations, his cussing was good for two things: at keeping attention off his partners, and causing magical mayhem and mischief. On this case, Marvin’s language gave them a small amount of privacy that they would not otherwise have.

Cussing spells were Marvin’s pride and joy, seldom used spells that, employed with his verbal and magical dexterity and precision, could cause nearby plastic to turn to garden soil, including the plastic housing of pickup mics and other electronic surveillance equipment. But his cussing spells couldn’t be used often, or the warden’s IT team would begin to see a correlation and Marvin might be in danger. So to hide the spells that caused problems, Marvin had to cuss like the Marine he had been forty years ago. All. The. Time.

“Right, Mable?” he asked, leaning toward the pert blonde. “Would you go to that school with me? Magic fucking school?”

Mable, the fourth partner in fighting crime, and Marvin’s lady-love in real life, tittered and blushed. She fanned her plump hand at her face as if trying to cool off from sexual heat.

Sandra smacked him again, contributing to keeping the servers’ attention off of Dani. Sandra’s persona was a straitlaced former preacher, which she had been in real life until her magic fell on her. Magic that, in her case, had been a curse. “I’m praying to Jesus for you, you nasty old man, but I have a feeling even God Almighty can’t help you.”

Marvin laughed out loud.

Dani continued to ignore them all. They all had jobs to do. Right now, hers was to observe, and after four weeks at the upscale magic school for late-blooming magic users, there was finally something to observe. She scooted her seat back a bit to get a better view out the window. She hoped her concentration would be interpreted as an interest in the garden and birds or disgust with her tablemates.

Marvin

Marvin blew a big, noisy kiss at Dani, who continued to ignore him. She was good at that. Maybe better at it than his first wife Jackie had been. And Dani didn’t give a rat’s ass what he, or anybody else, thought about her. She was skinny as a rail, had mottled skin that had baked too long in the sun at Myrtle Beach for too many years, and had vibrant blue eyes. Her hair was the color of steel and she had a backbone to match.

Tridevi Investigations had been Dani’s baby, when she got bored being retired. She had pulled her two old gal BFFs together and started the firm to solve paranormal crimes. Tridevi—for the three main Hindu goddesses, because they said all women were goddesses and had thought it sounded cool—had a good success rate solving magical crimes. That success rate had only gotten better when he joined, or so he was fond of telling them.

But she was spending too long staring. Something had to be happening out that window, something important to their case. Marvin had been a Marine way back when, and that situational awareness was still with him even now. He knew where every person in the room was, including the guard watching their table. To cover for Dani, he took Mable’s hand and kissed her knuckles with a loud smacking sound. “Oh, Mable baby, tonight will be fun!”

Marvin had a lot of skills, but his best skill was his charm. Even at seventy, he was still a well-built, sizable, good looking man with a big personality, and people talked to him, spilling all kinds of beans, because he was so damn delightful. The ladies especially let things slip, things they might not have said, had he acted less bombastic. It stood him well in investigations like this one, and playing the foul mouthed sex fiend was right up his alley. The ladies still flocked to him and he didn’t mind flirting to learn stuff, though he would never act on it, not since he tracked down and wooed his high school sweetie.

For a variety of IRS and pension reasons, he and Mable had never married, but he’d never cheat on her. He blew her a kiss and she blushed, for real this time.

He liked it when she blushed. She looked pretty with her blonde hair curled like a combination of Farrah Fawcett and Princess Diana. When her face went all pink, she was gorgeous. Mable was the love of his life, and though she played the simpering doll baby, she was also brilliant.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Zeddie, their void assistant, a human with null capabilities who couldn’t be affected by magics, approaching. Zeddie was pushing their food trays under stainless steel plate covers, along with a coffee carafe and a fresh pitcher of tea.

“Fuck,” Marvin said again, drawing Zeddie’s attention. Dani wasn’t usually so obvious about her nosy curiosity.

Mable giggled.

Marvin released her fingers and raised his cup in her direction as if toasting her. “Later, babe. I’ll make you happy alllll over.”

Sandra sighed and closed her eyes, as if praying. Maybe she was. Sandra was good like that, and even though she had lost her family and her church—an apostolic black church she and her husband had started in their youth—when her magic fell on her, she kept praying. Marvin didn’t believe, but some small part of him was always happy that she prayed for him.

Dani sipped her iced tea and ignored them, as usual, but she looked around the dining room, away from the window.

“Is everything okay, Mr. Danvers?” Zeddie asked, his red chin hair twitching, his brown eyes darting between them. “Your instructors want you to use care with the language. You know. After what happened last week.”

“It was just a little dirt,” Marvin said, pretending to get huffy. “High quality dirt. If you people hadn’t quit using cloth tablecloths, there wouldn’ta been any fucking plastic around to be transmuted. I told Devoe that, but did she put cloth back on the tables? No. She’s a cheap-wad.” As Marvin complained, Zeddie put their plates in front of them.

“Let me refresh your coffee,” Zeddie said, a barely hidden threat.

“Touch my coffee, lose a hand. Fucking decaf,” he muttered, this time really annoyed.

Marvin had bribed Zeddie to supply his bourbon and his real coffee stash. A fella hadda do something to survive in magic school for old geezers. Zeddie always referred to the students as inmates or geezers, and Tridevi had picked up on the terms. Geezers. Inmates. Not students. Kids these days had no respect for the elderly. But Marvin had to stay on Zeddie’s good side or he’d lose the smuggled bourbon, real coffee, and the investigation firm’s other necessities.

Zeddie turned to look at Dani, who was still silent, and again staring out the window. Marvin had to act fast.

“And here.” Marvin grabbed up his plate and shoved it at Zeddie. “This meatloaf is shit.”

On the plate, Marvin’s cold, gelatinous meatloaf turned to good rich garden dirt at the cursing. Marvin had a talent with beef as well as plastic. Good thing there were no cattle farms nearby, or he’d have had to work real hard to keep from bankrupting a farmer.

Zeddie sighed. “Shall a bring you a hamburger, Mr. Danvers?”

“Whatever. Since that cheap-wad COO Devoe let the chef go, even the burgers suck donkey—”

“Stop!” Sandra shouted. “Enough of the language you disgusting man.” She slammed her hand on the table top and started to stand. “If you say another word I will backhand you to Jesus.”

Sandra

Sandra knew what Marvin was doing, but sometimes he went too far. She was halfway out of her chair, one palm stinging from the impact with the table, the magazine raised in the other.

Marvin fell silent. Zeddie slid away to replace Marvin’s garden soil for a burger.

Dani nodded at her once and looked toward the kitchen and Zeddie’s retreating back. Her expression meant, “Keep Zeddie busy.” Things had to be happening outside the window.

Sandra sat slowly back into her chair. She knew that whatever Dani had discovered, it had to be related to the missing man that their clients had hired them to find, or the missing student-inmates at table J. Or both.

At some point after breakfast, all four residents at table J had vanished, and the staff had told them that the geezers had been offered a lucrative contract. No one believed it. A contract for four students at once? No. Nu-uh.

Marvin cussed again and Sandra closed her eyes, saying a prayer for patience and calm. While she was praying, she added a prayer for Harold. Her husband was feeling poorly.

Sandra had been a preacher in real life, with no magic in her bloodline at all, until she turned Harold into an emu during a very vibrant dream one night, the year she turned fifty-eight. She had been on heart medication at the time, and the doctors suggested that the medication had caused the dreams and brought on her power.

That accidental magic had turned Harold into a large, long-necked bird, and caused her to lose the church they had built from the ground up—the Trinity Flame of the Almighty God Church had kicked her out for practicing witchcraft, even though it hadn’t been intentional and only a dreadful accident. Even worse, her magic had ruined her family, causing her own children to hate her. Losing the church and her children had left her alone, grieving, and with no way to make a living. She had descended into a world of darkness and depression, until Dani had shown up at her door, needing a forensic accountant to do the books at her new magical investigating business, Tridevi.

Despite Marvin’s mouth, the agency had been her worldly savior. Working there had allowed her to give Harold the best veterinary care, supplements, and food, and keep a roof over her head.

Currently, Harold was in the petting zoo out back of The Sevens with all the other accidentally transformed people being kept safe, until their magic-wielders learned enough magic to turn them back to human. Sometimes that didn’t happen, and they stayed critters. Because she had never been able to willingly bring up her magic, Harold was among the permanently transformed humans, and had been a flightless bird for a decade. For the last few days, he had been off his feed, feeling uckish. Sandra was worried.

She had never before used him in a case, had always kept him safe in a pen at home, but this case was different. Their covers had to be impeccable, Tridevi needed her accounting skills to follow the money trails, and since they were undercover for weeks, Harold had to come with her, also undercover. He had his own perfectly assembled counterfeit documentation. Harold’s presence was helping her false identity to appear even more pristine than Mable’s skillful hacking and electronic forgery had done. A magically transformed emu could not be faked. Harold Holstead was their ace in the hole, plus, she could watch over him which usually allayed her protective instincts. Harold was old for an emu, and she was afraid she would never be able to turn him back to human again, which broke her heart.

Sandra was extremely powerful, powerful enough to be dangerous even to voids. She blamed herself for the evil of turning Harold into a bird, and most of the time she considered that putting up with Marvin’s mouth was a just punishment. Unfortunately, on this case, he’d had to make a point to be as detestable as he could. It was his cover, it helped them to get away with snooping, but still. Enough was enough. And Harold was sick. And the people at table J were missing. And though she’d never say it aloud, sometimes praying wasn’t enough. Sometimes she wanted to do something. Anything.

Opening her eyes, Sandra took a bite of meatloaf and allowed herself to observe Dani, who was again drinking her iced tea. Had she found their client? Were the missing people at Table J outside that window? Sandra missed being outside. Three weeks she had been stuck here undercover, and she hated every minute of it. She clamped her lips shut on her complaints. Things had been worse and they could always get worse again.

Under the table, Sandra felt Mable kick Dani.

Mable glared at Dani, and her stern friend nodded slightly, shooting them all a look to say things were happening.

Mable

Mable had had a face lift and a boob job before her magic fell on her and she looked better than any of the other old broads at the school. She still had “it” in every way. She was cute, sweet, adorable, and she could use her electronic wizardry to create perfect backstories. Had she been so inclined, she could also ruin a man’s credit and despoil his reputation, not that she ever would. Also, as a brown belt in Taekwondo and a black belt in judo, she could kick butt if they were attacked, and rip a guy’s balls to Mars if he tried to mess with them. Unless she saw blood, of course, in which case she’d be down for the count. Dani mighta started the biz, and Sandra’s accounting skills might have solved a lot of the cases, but Mable’s computer and electronic talents had made them successful.

She patted her hair and simpered at her beau. She liked being blonde, but blonde was tame these days. Maybe when they wrapped up this case, she would go sea witch green. Or cayenne red. That would make Marvin’s pecker stand up and take notice. Dani’s eyes had drifted over to the window again and she kicked her friend again, shooting her an angry glare that she hoped communicated, Are you trying to give us away?

Dani ignored her. There must be something really interesting and important out that window. When Tridevi first took the case, Mable had worked for two weeks trying to get into the security cameras in and around The Sevens and Building Z. She had been looking for proof that their client—a Big Hitter magic practitioner—had been sold into magical slavery in some foreign country.

Mable had been alternately livid that she hadn’t been able to break through The Sevens’ electronic security walls, and thrilled that she had finally found someone who could best her. The little she had been able to hack into had been confusing until she asked Sandra for help. Working together, they had discovered some financial indications that their client had not been sold off shore, but was still onsite, somewhere. The current theory was that his power was being harvested. And then they discovered the energy consumption and odd mix of medical personnel at Building Z.

Unfortunately, Mable had needed to be on site and hardwired in to track their clients’ missing family member, and so, one at a time, they had gone undercover. They had been on this case for weeks, trapped on the grounds. And Mable’s laptop had been confiscated upon admission, severely limiting her ability to do any real work. All she had to access the systems was a tablet Zeddie had smuggled in, and the small Invader Dani plugged into an unused wall socket in the lab.

Even with Marvin’s sexual prowess to make her happy, she was getting antsy. She needed a laptop. Bad.

Dani

About ten minutes later, men in white hazmat suites reappeared and drove back to the truck’s usual place. The back doors opened but their position obscured what was happening.

Dani ate a bite of tasteless meatloaf, sipped her tea, and tried to look relaxed. She had gone undercover at The Sevens first, and for the last four weeks she had made it a point to arrive at Table S an hour early for the five o’clock meal. Five was too dang early for supper in her opinion, not that anyone asked her. Civilized time was seven p.m.. Or eight. She would sit alone, sipping iced tea while she relaxed. Dani claimed she liked to look out the window at the garden and rest after the exertions of magic class, which was partially true and completely a lie. There were other things to see out that window than the azalea garden, bird feeders, and the staff parking lot. There was Building Z.

Mable’s kicking and glare forced her to look away from the window again and back to their small group at Table S. She ate another few bites of her dinner and frowned. Marvin was right. It was awful. The green beans were overcooked, and the mashed potatoes were surely reconstituted from dried potato flakes.

Zeddie brought Marvin’s burger. Dani wasn’t much of a cook, but even she could see that the meat had been freezer-burned, was over cooked, and the bun was stale. Poor Marvin. Thanks to his well-invested riches, he and Mable were used to a better quality of life than what was offered by the Sevens. Zeddie glanced at her, his brows raised. Dani said, “Wine. Chardonnay, please.” Softer, she added, “And not from an opened bottle.”

Zeddie grinned, gave her a thumb’s up, and vanished.

While he was gone, she ate what she could of the horrible meal.

Thanks to Mable’s computer skills, Dani had learned early on that Zeddie had a strong weed habit and could easily be bribed to provide small necessities. In Marvin’s case that meant booze and full-caffeine coffee. In her case, that meant two things: a small pitcher of iced sweet tea all to herself each night, for an hour of silence and peace before supper, so she could watch out the window at Building Z for an uninterrupted hour, and a halfway decent bottle of wine when requested. Not the adulterated garbage offered by the Sevens to the other geezers in the magical school.

When he had time, Zeddie provided a bit of gossip. For cash, of course.

Zeddie was a void who worked as wait staff in the kitchen and also helped out in the gym and swimming pool. Voids were in high demand in magic-training facilities, as they had a natural immunity to some forms of magic. He brought her a plastic wine glass full of beautiful golden liquid, gave her a wink, and waited. Dani pushed her plate away, sipped, decided the vintage was bearable, and gave him a single nod.

Zeddie grinned and vanished. Dani sat back with her plastic glass and stared out the window, her fingers stroking her pearls.

Mable had created her persona as the aloof, uppity, well-off woman, and that background worked, allowing her to sit back and observe without it looking as if she was snooping. In real life, Dani had been married to an ambulance chasing, personal injury lawyer. She knew all about appearing to be the person your client’s adversary needed you to be. She had lived for years with a man who said there was no real truth, only shades of the truth. “Uppity woman” wasn’t her, but it was a character she could work with.

When she first arrived, she had been warned by some other residents that Building Z was rumored to be full of former inmates. They had also told her that the inmates were monitored in case their magic went wonky. Potentially wonky magic was a good excuse for surveillance. It might even be a partial truth. People who came into their magic after age fifty often had wild magic, out of control and dangerous, but the geezer students had no idea that there were cameras everywhere, and the students were under observation 24-7.

Mable had also discovered that some of the inmates had disappeared, perhaps because those rumors were more than just speculation. And now there were changes in Building Z, but she wasn’t able to stare for long across the quad.

According to what Margie Devoe—AKA the warden—had told the family, Franz had “gone missing,” just packed up and walked away from the school, without a word to anyone. His family said it could have happened that way. Pop Franz had always been independent and stubborn. But his accounts had been drained and no one had seen or heard from Pop Franz for two months. And the school had refused to provide the family any security camera footage to back up their claim that he had walked off campus and disappeared.

When the Van Dijk family came to the firm for advice, Mable had quickly discovered that at least five other inmates had gone missing in the last two years. The family had hired Tridevi on the spot to track down Pop Franz. Marvin had assumed that the family also wanted his money back, but that wasn’t their concern. Their concern was Franz.

Tridevi’s current working theory was that a small group of the school’s staff was taking people and moving them so their power could be harvested. That made Building Z a potential hideaway. If so, the higherups had to know. The jackbooted security types, too. But not necessarily the instructors, kitchen or cleaning staff, or even the medical personnel at The Sevens. They worked shifts and if a resident-student disappeared or appeared and there was a plausible explanation, why would anyone question the story they were told?

The medical people at Building Z probably never saw anything but comatose patients being admitted and thought they were working on braindead magic users who had never learned how to control their power. It wasn’t completely uncommon for magic users to sign specific Do Not Resuscitate forms, donating their bodies and power to provide for their families by allowing the harvesting of their magic.

It was a working hypothesis for what had happened to Franz. Working hypotheses had to be proven. So far they had nothing but rumors, anxious clients, and worried old people who were pretty much prisoners in the school, people who had seen others disappear.

Mable kicked her again. Dani was going to end up with bruises.

Through the window, the staff at Building Z were still moving fast and taking no smoke breaks, acting the way they did when a VIP was on site.

The patient in the one room Dani could always see from her place at table S—here and no place else, thanks to the perfect alignment of this table with the building across the way—was no longer in his bed. This was a subtle change, but it made her heartrate speed. The patient—possibly Franzen Rubin Van Dijk—was sitting in a chair, staring, unmoving. The black cords that usually were hung in neat coils on the wall behind the bed were now stretched from the wall to the back of the patient’s head. And if the geezers’ rumors and Tridevi’s working theory was right about Z, Dani was really worried for Franz.

Dani returned her gaze to the large mass of congealed meatloaf on her plate. Marvin wasn’t right about much except the food. It was dreadful. But this investigation had gone on too long, with too little to show for it. Every day they were here might be the day they slipped up and got caught, which could be a death sentence—or a sentence to Building Z where they might never be heard from again.

She looked back out the window. The truck was missing. It had moved while she had looked away. Damn it.

Mable kicked her again but missed this time, her toes hitting the table leg. Mable sent her a pained expression. Served her right for kicking her.

Dani leaned back in her chair and checked the time on the clock on the wall. “My daughter hasn’t called yet. Have your kids called?” she asked the table in general.

Mable blew out a sigh of relief.

That started Marvin grumbling, loudly as usual, about his ungrateful kids. In real life, Dani knew, his kids were great. After all, he’d made them rich. Mable began patting his hand and offering to show him pictures of her grandkids, and Sandra called Zeddie over and demanded to know when she could have access to her cell phone to call her daughter.

The ruckus at table S started all the other tables—A through T—fussing about talking to family, and no one was paying attention to her any longer because of the general commotion. Which got louder as the inmates who were hard of hearing got in on the demands. They—The Sevens—didn’t let the residents have cell phones or other electronics, because their emerging magic might make the devices malfunction or even catch on fire. Which was a bunch of hooey so far as she ever saw, but that claim kept the inmates quiescent and controlled.

Except when Marvin got them riled up.

From his seat across from her, Marvin called out, “I want my fucking phone. I need to call my ungrateful brats to bring me some decent food!” And he threw the nasty hamburger at the new chef when he emerged from the kitchen to check on the rising noise level.

Dani called out, loudly, “I want my cell phone. And a bowl of vanilla ice-cream.”

The magic users at table M started chanting, “Ice-cream! Ice-cream! Ice-cream!”

The chef, realizing he had a potential uprising on his hands, scurried back for something to make the diners happy and quiet. Zeddie got on the house phone to call admin for cell phone requests.

Out the window, the white truck returned to its usual parking place, where two men in hazmat suits got out. She assumed they were the same two men, but in magical investigations assumptions were foolish.

They went to the back of the truck and disappeared from her vantage point again. Darn it. But…

By the time order had been restored to the dining room, and desserts and a few cell phones had begun to be delivered, the white truck had been back and forth again, for a total of four trips, from Building Z to what appeared to be the garage beneath the dormitory building. Four trips. One trip for each person at Table J?

The undercover group at S table in the dining room (and sleeping in Dorm-hall Delta) might now, finally, have something to work with, something that would prove their working hypothesis. All they needed was access to the inmates’ records, which they could only get with access to a laptop for Mable to work her magic. A laptop that Zeddie was supposed to have smuggled in days ago.

Tridevi was the best at what they did. Marvin recycled plastic, cussed, and was a sex fiend; Sandra turned people into animals while dreaming, kept the books and did the work of a forensic accountant, and lived with guilt; Mable made dragons out of large birds, like crows, had uncanny electronic skills and could beat up people; and Dani, well, Dani blew things up.

Dani smiled grimly. They were here to rescue Franz, but unofficially, they intended to rescue all the geezers in Building Z, like some geriatric superheroes with magic power and bad attitudes. Dani’s grin went wider at the thought.

Marvin

The phone call to Tridevi’s clerk—the twenty-something who was playing his son on this gig—had been fun. His fake son got a good ass-chewing for not visiting, followed by the usual threat to cut him out of his will. Marvin had the kid cowed, even by fake abuse. Who knew he was such a good actor? Maybe after he outlived all the broads at Tridevi, he’d take up acting.

“Come on, Mable-girl,” he said to his lady-love. “Let’s go upstairs. I got enough little blue pills to make you happy,” Marvin poured another cup of bourbon coffee.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Sandra sigh and shake her head.

“You’ll give yourself a brain aneurism one day, taking so much sex meds,” Sandra muttered. “How did you even manage to smuggle them in here?”

Marvin gave her a sly grin and waggled his eyebrows.

“Never mind. I do not want to know,” the light-skinned black woman said. “Accept it, old man. You were not given sex magic. You got garbage magic, which is a much more useful curse than sex magic.”

“But not more fun. Right, Mable?”

Mable tittered. He blew more kisses in her general direction.

Marvin’s talent had waked one rainy day with the ability to break down anything except metal and glass into good quality garden soil. Plastic was his specialty, and he had entered into a private contract with an international garbage and recycling company, a very specific and confidential contract that kept his identity classified, so he could live out his life in peace, once his five-year contract was completed. He’d made a fortune in recycling for that five years. He’d provided for his family and could now retire a dozen times over, but as he’d discovered when he retired the second time, retirement was boring. He’d gotten the roaming urge and sold his house, using the dough to buy an RV. His third wife, Coral, had not been overly impressed with the idea of moving into an RV, even a million dollar one. She had wiggled her cute little ass at him and walked out, taking her percentage of the cash, and was now living in a retirement facility for millionaires in Florida. That had led him to Tridevi. And to Mable, his high school sweetheart. The one he let get away.

The cover Mable had created for him had made use of his abilities and his cussing. Mable was brilliant like that. That cover made him both valuable and dangerous, and he was the bait to The Sevens management. He fit the profile of the people who had been disappeared. If Tridevi was right about the Sevens, and if he slipped up, he’d never be going home. He’d spend the rest of his life serving in the Geezer’s magical prison—Building Z—drugged, hooked up to a magic-collecting device, his power being harvested, used to make money for someone else, and watched constantly by void overseers in case his magic went haywire. If that happened, Marvin would disappear, never to visit his granddaughters—his real granddaughters—again.

That is—if they were right about Building Z. Already they knew something was fishy. No one at the magic geezer school was ever allowed to leave, not for holidays or visits with families. Not even funerals. All of them were on a short leash and leaving the main building was forbidden, except for occasional visits in the central atrium, which was open to the air and sunshine, and the even rarer visits with family who were willing to make the drive here in the middle of fucking forsaken nowhere.

But so far they were golden.

Their safety was thanks to the lack of control he’d displayed—deliberately, but the school didn’t know that—turning things into dirt. The cussing was something he pretended not to be able to control and it caused accidents. Like the tables’ plastic coverings disintegrating into soil.

The catastrophic coup d'etat had been the injudicious addition of his favorite word into a recycling spell. The magic spell had been intended to turn a plastic milk jug into garden soil, but it had mysteriously gone sideways. The car belonging to the chief operating officer, Margorie Devoe, had been transformed into a pile of metal, glass, and good quality dirt.

Marvin smiled into his bourbon. It had been a very expensive Bentley. And it had not been a mistake. Marvin had added the word fuckety to the spell on purpose, and guided it to that one car out of all the others in the parking lot. Therefore, he was no longer allowed to speak spells unsupervised, even to practice. He was powerful and appeared to be unloved by any family, except for Mable, and unable to control his curse. He was the perfect patsy. Bait.

A bell rang overhead, the signal that supper was over. “Fuck it,” he mumbled. “I can’t wait until I can get a real burger.”

Mable

Mable patted Marvin’s hand. When Marvin reappeared in her life, she had been divorced for twenty years, had her own home, a red convertible, and had a sweet boy toy of only fifty to keep her happy in the sheets. Unlike some others, she hadn’t made millions off her magic, as her curse had limited usefulness. Instead, she had made her living off marriage to faithless men.

In her first marriage, when she thought her neurosurgeon husband, John, might be cheating, Mable had employed a really good investigator, who had caught him in the act. Pictures and everything. That taught her a good lesson.

Most men only thought with their peckers. Peckers were really stupid.

Three marriages. Three settlements. The money had been well invested.

After each of her marriages, Mable upgraded her body and moved on. She hadn’t had all that work done on her body to not make use of it.

Zeddie handed her phone to her and she simpered at him. “Thank you, dearie.” She dialed Monica, her personal assistant, and chatted as if they were mother and daughter.

When her magical curse had fallen on her at age sixty-one, she had been picked up by the local police for accidentally throwing magic around. When she hadn’t been able to control it, she had been forced to leave her current beau behind when she was shipped off to her first—and only real—magic school concentration camp. But that was years ago in Alabama.

Her crime had been a simple transmutation of a murder of crows in her back yard into fire breathing dragons. Three small dragons, but the two alarm fire that had resulted when the mini-dragons set the autumn-dry leaves in the forest behind her home aflame had been costly. At a real school, she had learned to control her dragons when they were close by, but when they got free or were sold, her dragons set things on fire. There was a very limited market for that—a Las Vegas show had hired her, but when the casino burned down, she lost that gig.

And then there had been Dani, Sandra, Tridevi, and Marvin.

She kissed the air between them and batted her eyes at her sweetie. Stuff young people expected old people to do. When Marvin reappeared in her life, she’d given up her current boy-toy and some of her independence. Marvin was worth it.

She had hated magic school the first time. She had sworn she would never go back, but here she was. At least she had Marvin and her friends. All for one and one for all, and all that stuff.

“Love you too, Sweetie,” she said to Monica, and ended the call.

She handed Zeddie the phone and tapped Marvin’s hand, the one holding the mug of coffee and bourbon. The horny, bourbon drinking, blue-pill-taking Marvin, looked over at her. “You want a magic hoochie cootchie school? If you can handle another go round today, I can make your pecker stand up right now, big boy.” Mable gave a little shoulder shimmy that shook her ample bosom.

Dani coughed. Fake cough. To cover laughter. Mable’s cover was that she met Marvin the day she moved to the school and they were having a wild fling. Timing their admissions and their falsified documentation had been fun.

Mable stuck her tongue out at Dani. Just the tip. She was a lady after all.

Dani’s cover was of a gray-haired stick in the mud who liked art and fancy wine.

Sandra’s cover was exactly what she was. A former preacher full of guilt.

Mable was a fun-loving party girl, which was actually true. Even after the magic hit her, Mable still craved men and sex. She had spent time with plenty of guys, and of them all, Marvin was the best. Thanks to the pills.

Dani

Dani glanced back outside, but the truck was still parked in its usual place. Even after four weeks here, she was amused at the byplay at the table, but trying not to show it; amusement would have ruined her cover as the standoffish, snobby widow MacCharles. Mable fluttered her lashes and stroked Marvin’s thigh, part of her cover, but also a normal action for her. Mable had had a reputation even back in the high school that she, Marvin, and Dani had attended. The brilliant blonde had been hot to trot in the nineteen seventies and she hadn’t slowed down as she neared her own seventies.

Marvin and Mable had been banging uglies—Marvin’s words—ever since he opened the door to Tridevi, walked straight up to Mable, and said, “I’ve been looking for you for forty-five years, Mable Esterline. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

Mable had said, “Marvin, are you gonna cheat on me again?”

“Darlin’, I have regretted that every year and every moment we’ve been apart. If you go out with me, I swear by all that’s holy, I’ll be faithful to you until we die. And my word is golden.”

“I warn you. I’m pretty good with martial arts now. You cheat on me again, I’ll yank off your willie and throw Mr. Wonderful to the fish.”

Then Mable had thrown her arms around his neck and locked lips. She had also taken three weeks off from Tridevi. She had been glowing ever since.

Dani and Sandra had met in the nineteen-nineties, at a luncheon put on by the city churches to encourage discourse between black and white congregations. In their case, the interfaith initiative had paid off and they had been friends ever since.

Tridevi made a good team.

Dani glanced once more out the window. It looked as if things in Building Z were winding up. The white truck was still parked back where it had started and the men who had been driving back and forth were stripping out of the hazmat suits. They tossed them in a plastic bag before heading to the parking lot.

Zeddie brought their desserts to Table J. Not ice cream, but oatmeal cream pies. Gross. Dani put hers in her purse and tapped on the table three times, the signal that they needed to meet in the hallway for a quick word. Normally they only met in the mornings, but they had to know what she had seen.

They all got up, Marvin slinging his plastic wrapped pie at the kitchen door. He was a pretty good shot. It hit mid center with a plastic-rattling thump as they stepped into the hallway.

They gathered in the hall in front of the dining room, and Marvin, who had a lot more control than The Sevens’ COO knew, said, “That dessert was fuckety fucking disgusting.” That particular use of Marvin’s favorite word was his plastic-to-dirt spell. The pickup mics all around them turned into dirt and rained from the ceiling tiles. The plastic in the vinyl tiles under their feet bubbled and turned to dirt, and, unfortunately, the elastic in Dani’s pants turned to dirt too.

Dani grabbed her pants’ waistband and glared at him.

“Fuck,” Marvin said again, and sighed as if he had made a mistake, though it was likely the icing on the cake that continued to make the staff believe in Marvin’s lack of control. “Sorry.”

Before the guards showed up, Dani quietly told them what she had seen out the window.

The moment Zeddie poked his head out the door, Sandra slapped Marvin with the magazine. “You nasty man. You stop messing with my drawers!”

“I didn’t do it on purpose! It was an accident! Stop whacking me, you religious nutcase!”

“There ain’t nothing wrong with being a religious nut! God loves religious nuts!”

“Then go whack God with your magazine!” Marvin yelled. “Zeddie. Help me!”

There followed loud accusations from Sandra and Dani, and Zeddie spoke into his small radio. Moments later, they were graced with an appearance by the warden, Margorie Devoe. Devoe was tall, a pale-skinned magic user in her forties, a former model with a master’s in business, and the patter of a snake oil salesman. She wore her hair long, dyed a metallic red, and still walked as if she owned the runway. Her word was law.

Holding up her pants, Dani waded up to Devoe and demanded that Marvin be gagged. Marvin cussed and blustered. Dani glared. Sandra prayed for them all at the top of her lungs, one hand in the air, the other holding up her clothes. Mable simpered.

It was a good act. The warden fell for it and placated them all with promises of ice-cream tomorrow night, especially Marvin, heaping attention on him, though remembering to offer commiserating glances at the rest of them.

Marvin’s “talent was a cash cow,” if Devoe and her staff could, “teach him how to harness his power.” Devoe’s words. She gave him special attention in magic classes. He was teacher’s pet, through and through. Even after the Bentley incident.

When the kerfuffle was over, Tridevi’s team all stomped silently to their rooms.

That was the only moment of unobserved conversation they would have until they all joined up for pre-breakfast tea and coffee in Marvin’s room. There was nothing else Dani could do tonight.

When Mable originally hacked into The Sevens’ security system, she had created a one hour window when the dorm’s internal security system wouldn’t work. It was driving the IT team nuts. Mable was wonderfully evil. But an hour was all they had each day for a debrief.

Until morning, Dani had a spell she needed to pretend to work on and a lot of thinking to do. And she fervently hoped that the laptop had been smuggled into the school at last.

Sandra

Just before eight a.m., Sandra returned from checking on her emu husband. Harold looked better today and had eaten a nice breakfast of eighty percent emu ratite pellets, with the balance being a sliced apple, alfalfa pellets, and beets. She tried to switch it up every day with seasonally available veggies because human-Harold had been a food-loving man with a craving for soul food cooked the way her mama taught her. Emu-Harold was less particular. One day she saw him snatch up a mouse and swallow it whole. The sight had made her sick to her stomach. But that day … That had been the day she realized she might never get Harold back. That had been her first day of real grief.

After the mouse-eating-day, she had let Dani persuade her to join Tridevi to take her mind off her woes. Though younger than the others in the firm, she had trained as a forensic accountant—someone who tracked down missing money—back before she and Harold were called by God to start the church. Doing Tridevi’s books, working with people who weren’t afraid of her, had been a spiritual lift. Even with Marvin’s mouth.

The elevator opened on the fourth floor of the dormitory building, Dorm Hall Delta. Sandra stepped out, caught a glimpse of the camera in the corner and checked her watch. Instead of going briskly to her room, she slowed as she walked the hallway toward her room at the end.

Dorm Delta was the hallway of suites where they had all been placed, having arrived within seven days of each other. The clock passed eight, the cameras went dead, she stopped, tapped on Marvin’s door, and he let her in. Mable tucked in behind her.

Marvin had tea and coffee waiting for each of them. Despite his spell-cussing mouth, he was a good host. If Sandra had allowed herself the sin of hard liquor, she had no doubt that Marvin would share his stash with her.

Sandra took the hot tea he offered and sipped with pleasure. It was the good stuff, not the cheap teabag fannings and dusts offered by The Sevens’ management. “Thank you,” she murmured to Jesus, her eyes closed. And because Marvin had finally figured that out, he waited until she opened her eyes and said, “And thank you, Marvin.”

“You’re welcome.”

In minutes, Dani joined them, shutting the door quietly. She took her place beside Sandra and drained half her coffee in a big gulp. “Thank God,” she said, breathing in the steam. “Decaf is not cutting it.” She opened her eyes and said, “I need to tell you more about the truck yesterday and the two guys in hazmat suits.” She added details about the suits and the truck and descriptions of the men—height, weight, and their hair color, which she noted when they removed the suits. “The truck might actually have something to do with our case. Or not. But it’s all we have and right now anything is better than nothing.

Before anyone could reply she asked, “How’s Harold?”

Dani always remembered to ask about Harold, and it made Sandra’s heart happy. She smiled gently and said, “Better. And I have news too. The head keeper at the barnyard told me they had a former human—currently a two hundred pound boa constrictor—who is now a widow.” Sandra had everyone’s attention for the moment. She wasn’t often the center of attention anymore, having lost her congregation when she magicked-out. And people who could turn others into emus had a hard time making friends. “Buck Hackenmeister supposedly passed away yesterday. Eloise is now permanently a snake.”

Dani nodded thoughtfully and shoved a strand of steel gray hair back behind her ear. “Buck used to sit at table J. Him being dead is a different story from the one concocted by the school, about J all getting a contract together. And yesterday at supper is when I saw all the transfers of the white truck, and not a sign of the coroner’s van.”

“You think they lied about Buck and moved him to Building Z?” Sandra asked.

“I think someone messed up on the story they told, so yes, I think Buck was moved yesterday,” Dani said.

“I got an email from the office on that useless tablet. They noticed a sudden increase in The Sevens’ special account,” Mable said, “to the tune of seven hundred, fifty-two thousand dollars, and change. It coincides with Buck’s mostly liquid assets.”

“We need to find a way over there,” Dani said, not for the first time.

“Mable and I have news too,” Marvin said. “My darlin’ love was able to create a short term glitch in the camera system that let us finally get out. We went for a little walk last night to pick up the laptop.” He sipped his coffee, making them wait for the rest.

“And?” Dani asked.

Marvin was a controlling, manipulative, godless man, and if he wasn’t also kind, from the top of his white hair to his toes, Sandra would have hated him. But he was. Kind, that is. He did a lot of good with his fortune, posting checks with significant numbers of zeros to the homeless shelter where Sandra volunteered.

“And?” Dani demanded, louder.

Marvin grinned.

Sandra stifled her desire to whack him with the magazine she always carried. That violent action was her undercover persona’s, not her own, but she had to confess, even if only to herself and God, that smacking Marvin gave her a deep and abiding pleasure, regardless of his well spent wealth.

Finally Marvin gave in, and said, “We were able to retrieve the laptop Zeddie smuggled in, and with it, Mable got us into the basement garage. We saw the whole place and managed to also get into the utility closet where the linens are delivered.” His eyes brows waggled suggestively, “Where we got in a little hanky-panky too.”

“We nearly got caught,” Mable said, clearly pleased at having evaded detection, “but with the laptop, I was able to redirect attention away from the closet.”

“I do not want to know any details of what you were doing in the utility closet,” Sandra said firmly. She got up to make hot water for more tea.

“Aw,” Marvin said. “You woulda been so proud of Mable’s flexibility.”

Sandra blew out an exasperated breath but did not turn around.

“With the new laptop, and thanks to my sweetie pie’s gift for destroying surveillance equipment, I can do so much now.” Mable gushed. “I wish Zeddie had been more amenable to getting it for me sooner.”

“We had to build up his trust,” Dani said. “Better late than never. What did you see?”

Mable

Mable watched Sandra. She was better today. She was less tense, less fidgety. Harold must really be recovering. In her off time, Mable had researched ways to turn Harold back to human, but … there was nothing in the databanks, even on the Dark-Witch-Web, (the dark web for black witch groups) that showed her a spell for another practitioner to return Harold to human. It had to be the practitioner who turned him in the first place. A third party couldn’t force a cursed person’s return to human shape. And Sandra, well Sandra hated and feared her power so much she had never been able to pull up her gift.

The guilt ridden former preacher stared out the window at the petting zoo, which could be seen from Marvin’s window. Mable knew that if Sandra had her way, she would live in the pen with Harold, her motives all mixed together, from self-loathing, to grief and love, to some form of penance.

Mable turned on the smuggled-in laptop, listening with half an ear to Marvin, who was still explaining about their big adventure. It had been far more dangerous than they had expected. She was never one to turn away from a little fun and games, but last night they had been close to getting caught by people who, it was likely, had no fear of committing crimes.

“While we were in the basement,” Marvin said, as if it had been wonderful, “some men came in through the overhead door, driving a white truck. It looked a lot like the one in front of Building Z. The men were wearing white hazmat suits, like you described, and they moved a man from this building into the truck and whisked him away.”

“Is anyone else missing?” Dani asked.

“We don’t know,” Mable said, patting her hair back from her face. It had been four weeks since her last haircut and style and she really needed her roots done. “He was male, short, and heavyset, but we never got a look at his face.” Partially because they had been bent over an upturned laundry cart when the garage door opened, but that was another story entirely.

Most people were never hit with magic gifts, and few were cursed with a big ball of energy late in life, but some of the older students at The Sevens had been cursed hard, like Buck and the other missing geezers from Table J. When they arrived, there had been nine inmates on the Big Hitters list, including Marvin and Dani, the missing people at Table J, including Buck and a ninety year old woman who loved to knit, named Emogene Smathers, and a man from Table B, named Richard D. Richards, who fit the physical description of the man they saw wheeled away. Big hitters were the ones who could help save the planet. Or make big bucks for someone in the darker world of money laundering or drug-running … or power harvesting. But other big hitters had disappeared over the three years prior.

Mable entered a line of code and hit ENTER. A database opened and Mable could have squealed in delight. She had found a way in to the log of new patients at Building Z.

“News,” she said. “The missing geezers are not runaways or dead. We have five new admissions to Building Z in the last twenty-four hours.” She looked at her crimes-solving partners. “I’m betting they were drugged, carted away, and are now in lockdown and unconscious.”

Dani ground out, “Our current theory was right. The power of magic practitioners is being harvested for profit, and against their will.”

“Yeah,” Mable said. “And now that I have a computer on site, I can track everyone and figure things out.”

“Can you get in to all the records?” Dani asked.

Mable’s fingers flew over the keyboard, her eyes searching the security code for the weakness that had to be there. Had to be. Had to be. Had to be. “Ohhh. There you are,” she whispered. And then, the firewall snapped up again. She cussed softly.

Marvin chuckled and rubbed her shoulders.

Dani started again, “Have you—”

Mable glared at her. “Stop. Before you ask, yes, I think I can get into the security system here in this building, but I’ll have to be really careful not to leave traces, so don’t ask for the moon. And no, I haven’t yet found a way to penetrate the electronic security at Building Z. I think I need to go old-school and hardwire it there. Inside Building Z.”

Everyone looked down at their drinks.

Marvin took her hands off her laptop and squeezed her fingers to get her to relax. He was a comforting man, and it was the little gestures like this that told her how much he loved her. She squeezed back.

Marvin said, “More important is what the warden told the drivers of the white truck.”

“I got it on tape,” Mable said.

She touched the face of her illegal laptop and Margorie Devoe’s voice sounded, clipped and in control. “This is a standard removal protocol. One to transfer.”

A man’s voice said, “Yes ma’am. We’re picking up a resident from Dorm Alpha, seventh floor?”

Devoe said, “The desserts of the other residents on Dorm Alpha were dosed with a light sleeping medication to keep their dangerous magic down, in case it’s contagious.”

“Magic goin’ crazy is contagious?” a second man asked.

“It is in the elderly,” Margorie lied, her voice uninflected, as if she was talking about a mannequin instead of a human being. “The dorm will be monitored to make certain they’re all asleep. The sedative should hit them in an hour, at which time you will take the resident from his room, cover his head with void strips, and take him down the service elevator, to the truck.”

“Why we gotta do all that?” the second man asked. “’at sounds a lot like kidnapping. I don’t know about this, lady.”

“His magic hit his own brain and fried it,” the first man said. “It happens more often in geezers than you think.”

Devoe added, “He signed the papers for this when he was admitted here. This method is to protect the residents from uncontrolled, dangerous, and contagious magic, not kidnapping.”

“We strap the geezer onto the gurney and transport him to Building Z,” the first guy said. “Easy.”

“What if he lets loose a spell? Or runs?” the uncertain man asked.

The other man laughed. “Never happened. He’s out cold. They always are when their brains get fried. And besides, we’re faster than any old fogies in support hose and knee braces.”

Mable touched her screen off.

Sandra closed her eyes. “Dear God.”

It was clearly a prayer and Mable didn’t know what to do. She had never prayed and when Sandra did, it was creepy.

Sandra opened her eyes and looked at them, meeting their eyes, one by one, her own full of conviction and purpose. Mable felt the power in her gaze like a slap to her face. “We have to save them,” the former preacher said. “It’s why we were put here.”

Mable wasn’t sure what Sandra meant about that, but she agreed. No one should be harvested. She went back to her laptop and a moment later said, “I got into the medical orders. Buck didn’t fry his own brain. He was dosed with a knockout drug.”

“That’s the proof we’ve been looking for,” Dani said. “The Sevens really are harvesting power. Send that to the office.”

Dani

“It’s time to institute plan Blow Things Up,” Dani said.

She glanced at her coffee and concentrated. The liquid reheated without boiling over or exploding straight up into the air. In class, when she tried that spell she never used control; there, it was as if she’d stuck a magic cherry bomb in the bottom of the mug, just like when she first got her power.

Her talent had fallen on her like an anvil at age sixty-two, in midflight over Arizona, and had nearly brought down the 747 she was taking to Reno to visit her granddaughter. Back then, if she got mad, things blew up. Now, if she still wanted to, she could keep a small city in power through steam production, but she had all the cash and investments she and her family would ever need. After she finished her five-year contract helping to supply the energy needs of Las Vegas, she had wanted something more. Not a contract where she worked for a company, but something for her and her friends. Tridevi had come out of that need.

Sandra clapped her hands softly. “That was beautiful,” she said of the warm coffee.

“I like it better when she blows shit up,” Marvin grumbled.

“So,” Dani said, “we need to get someone into Building Z as a patient. Marvin, you destroying the warden’s car didn’t work. If anything she was even more interested in keeping you here, where she could negotiate a contract for you. Sandra, no one expects you to turn another person in order to get put over there. And we need Mable free to do her electronic magic, not hooked up to a machine.” Dani thought through what she was about to say and decided it was still the best plan. “Sooo. I guess, today, I’ll blow something up, dissolve into tears, and storm off to my room.”

The others looked at her in dismay.

“Mable,” she continued, “I’ll need one of Marvin’s MTTs put in under my skin.”

Marvin had invested a large percentage of his holdings into electronic companies and startups, and one such company had devised MTTs—Mini-Tracker-Transmitters. They worked alone, or in conjunction with another of the company’s devices called the Invader. The devices were the heart and soul of Tridevi’s plan to rescue Franz, and now Buck, and the others from Table J.

“We don’t know what kind of brain damage The Seven’s magic energy collection system does,” Sandra said softly. “If we’re right and they do brain surgery to install a port, and if we can’t get you out in time, you may be … permanently ….” Her mouth closed in a firm line.

Dani squeezed her hand. “Permanently brain damaged forever. I figured that out. But I trust you all to rescue me, and someone needs to go inside. It needs to be Marvin or me, and they didn’t take Marvin’s bait. I think they’ll take mine. With the MTT and Marvin’s Invader, Mable should be able to cut off any drugs, and I should quickly be able to wreak havoc.”

Marvin looked hard at her. “The MTTs haven’t been tested on humans. And if we can’t get inside to place the Invader in your room, or if Mable for some reason can’t manipulate the Invader, you might be lost.”

Invaders were cute little mini-computers that, when plugged into a regular old AC socket, allowed the software on Mable’s computer to invade every computerized unit or system within twenty linear feet. It was also a tracker, recorder, and transmitter.

Mable opened her bag and removed the tiny surgical kit disguised as a sewing kit. From it she took the even tinier MTT. “Sandra should put it under your boob or in the wrinkles under your arm. You decide.”

“First time I was ever happy I had batwings and floppy boobs. Better do it high in the upper arm,” Dani said to Sandra. “They’ll probably strip me and hook me up to EKGs and IV’s to drug me.”

She watched as Sandra—the only one of them who had ever volunteered at a hospital and seen minor surgery—took the sewing kit and laid out her equipment: a tiny, sterile surgical scalpel, the MTT, and glue. Marvin pulled a pair of stolen gloves out of the drawer at the coffee maker, and some 60% alcohol hand sanitizer. It was the bare minimum, and not nearly as sterile as Dani wanted, but it was a short term implant. She hoped.

“I never …” She stopped and wiped her hands on her dress. “I’ve never done this before,” Sandra said, “and watching doctors use superglue on wounds and videos of the proper implantation procedures didn’t give me skill. Plus …” she heaved a sigh. “I’m going to hurt you.”

“It’s okay, Sandra,” Dani said.

Sandra didn’t respond as she pulled a chair and a small table to the sofa and cleaned everything with the sanitizer, including her gloves, before opening the scalpel.

Dani stood, looked at each of them, and said softly, “You— Please. Don’t leave me in there long.”

“We’ll be behind you today,” Marvin said, “even if I have to turn every car in the parking lot into garden dirt.”

He looked determined and stubborn, and if there was a little delight gleaming in his eyes at the idea of going rogue and destroying things wholesale, well that was okay by her.

Mable said, “We don’t have much time left in this hour. Marvin, give the woman some privacy.” She shooed Marvin into his own bedroom and shut the door.

“I’m sorry,” Sandra whispered, maybe to her God, or maybe to her very first patient, Dani wasn’t sure.

“I’d rather you than Mable fainting at the sight of blood or Marvin’s baseball mitt hands.” Dani pulled off her shirt, lay down on the sofa, lifted her am to expose the skin under her arm, took a deep breath, and prepared to suffer in silence. This was going to hurt. Probably not as bad having kids or some of the so-called painless surgical procedures she’d had over the years, but not comfortable, either.

Mable spun to look out the window. “Horrors. You know I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“But you beat people up,” Dani said, needing to lighten the mood.

“Yeah and then I walk away while they bleed so I don’t pass out, bang my face, and ruin my plastic surgeon’s excellent work.”

Dani chuckled, which was probably what Mable had intended.

Sandra

Zeddie approached the lunch table, pulling the dessert cart and carrying the mail bag. It was time. Sandra thought about Harold, pulling all the sadness and angst into her, to use it to fuel her acting. She focused her thoughts the way she did with prayer.

“Mail for everyone.” Zeddie put small piles of mail in front of each of them.

“I don’t know why you bother to bring all that stuff,” Sandra complained, as she did every lunchtime. “It’s nothing but AARP mail, Medicare garbage, and car warranty ads.” But this time she added, “And you people have already steamed them open. I hate that. And I hate that I haven’t gotten a letter from Carl since I got here.” Tears gathered in her eyes.

Zeddie patted her shoulder and motioned to a councilor.

Sandra sniffed. According to her falsified bio, Carl was her fake son, based upon her real son, Aaron, who had turned away from her in real life, when she developed magic and transformed his dad into Big Bird. Just like fake Carl, Aaron never accepted her calls and he never wrote. It had broken her heart. And that made playing out the scene they had planned so much easier. She whispered, “I miss my life.” All that was true. Her tears fell faster.

Dani reached over and took Sandra’s hand. “He’ll come around. I’m sure he will.”

“Maybe this will make you feel better. I’ve got dessert.” Zeddie reached back behind him to pick up plates from his rolling cart. “We have lemon cream pie.”

It wasn’t cream pie. It was gelatinous goo. Sandra dropped the envelopes into her lap and burst into tears. “I want Harold back!” she wailed. “I want Carl! I want my church and … and … I want my life back!” Tears flooded down her face, the emotions easy to feel, the words easy to say, because it was all true. She banged her fists on the table. “Harold. Harold. What have I done?”

The counselor, a void who helped the inmates deal with emotional trauma which could potentially set off unexpected, uncontrolled magic, knelt at her side. “Here. This will help.” She handed Sandra a pill. “Take this. You can skip afternoon classes and take a nap. You didn’t sleep well last night.”

“And how do you know that?” Dani shouted. “How do you know she didn’t sleep well?”

Dani shoved back her chair and it turned over with a thump. Loudly, she said, “The only way you would know that is if you really are monitoring us! Hey, everybody!” Dani turned to the room. “They know Sandra didn’t sleep. They really are monitoring us! They watch us all the time!”

Several of the inmates shoved back their chairs too, getting up slowly. But what happened next wasn’t slow. It all happened at once.

Dani

One woman screamed, “In the bathtub? You perverts!” Her magic zoomed out like a gunshot, the tectonic force breaking a ceramic pot of silk flowers, which tumbled to the floor in pieces.

Another man stood and shouted, “You mean they watch me with my wife?” His wife was a goat, and Dani’s brain slid sideways, not thinking about that one.

A woman shrilled something unintelligible and the electric lights browned out all through the dining room as her magic zinged away from her fingers.

“I want Harold back! I want Carl!” Sandra wept loudly, her fists banging on the table.

When she raised her head to wail, the counselor dropped a pill into her mouth. Sandra coughed and drank her water. She had been warned not to swallow the pill however and when she put her head down to wail again, Dani watched to make sure she was able to spit out the pill and tuck it into her pocket.

When Sandra was safe, Dani turned to the room, ready to become Tridevi’s sacrificial lamb, in a plan that they all had helped to craft. Unexpected fear washed through her. If this didn’t work …

She pushed the fear away. They would get her out. They always did.

Dani shouted, “We need to take over this place! It’s not what they say it is! The food is garbage! Look at the cream pie! It’s nothing but Jello!”

The staff were calling for backup. All the eyes were on Dani.

“Think about it,” she called, raising her arms, drawing her power to her. “They told us there was no way to control our powers without their anti-magic tech, but they say there isn’t enough anti-magic tech for all of us.”

She pointed at the other tables scattered around the room, each table with four classmates who were of similar power signatures, or who had been admitted close to the same time. Every resident-student had been ripped away from their lives and their families to learn to control power they didn’t want and that could be dangerous, and each of them were being forced to eat disgusting food.

“They watch us,” she shouted. “They teach us nothing. And this lemon stuff they call cream pie is mostly corn starch! The whipped cream isn’t even from a mammal. Its main ingredients are water, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.” Old people had few demands, but privacy and decent food were high on the list. Dani picked up her pie plate and slung it across the room. “It’s crap. I bet the warden and her staff get the real whipped cream.”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Marvin shouted. “The dairy stuff makes me fart. But no way am I letting them watch Mable and me!” He stood too. “Fuck this! Fuckety fuck this.” The newly replaced plastic light fixtures overhead turned to dirt and dribbled down. The bulbs still burned, but now too bright.

“And we need to know the truth about the rumors. About table J.” Dani pointed at the empty table, ignoring the pain under her arm from the recent amateur surgery. “And about that building they don’t talk about!” She pointed in the general direction of the windows. “I think we’re right! The failed magical geezers are probably living their final days in a drugged haze, their magic harvested to make the school money!”

Which was the truth. The truth was a powerful thing and the geezers all around her knew truth when they heard it.

Around the room there were little explosions of magic: a small fire as the fake flowers on one table flamed; a mini earthquake shook the floor, sending the water in the glasses shivering; a tiny puff of wallboard dust erupted as a wall cracked from ceiling to floor. The geezers were losing control. It was spreading.

An explosion sounded from the kitchen. The chef squealed in shock and pain.

A glass shattered on one table. A stoneware plate cracked.

“Maybe we were right!” Dani shouted. “Maybe they really do surgically implant plugs in the back of our heads, directly into our brains.”

The man who had set the fire shouted, “I told you so! They hook us up to supercomputers that run the world!”

A woman at another table yelled, “They use us!”

Marvin stood and yelled, “Is that what you people are doing? Using us for power grids and shit?”

A former politician yelled out, “Probably high-tech military devices, and financial markets.”

“It’s like that movie, the Matrix, but without the cute guy and the cool special effects,” another woman shouted, pushing against the table to stand.

People were milling everywhere. The room itself was shaking. Three windows shattered but proved to be safety glass, and Marvin didn’t turn his recycling magic at the plastic, so they stayed together instead of turning to sharp shards and dirt.

Dani had lost track of who was getting involved, but half of the tables were empty, and everyone was upset. The feel of magic was an electric buzz in the air and along her skin.

“Zombies,” a man with a very rounded belly shouted. “Kept drugged, our power drained and used by the warden to make money! Working us until we die.”

All the plates on table Q flew up and hit the ceiling. Shattered stoneware rained down and some of Marvin’s remaining dirt landed on the inmates.

“The warden said all the people at table J got contracts!” A woman said, her voice quavering.

“All together?” Dani shouted. “I don’t think so.” She pointed at the doorways as the security teams, all dressed in black like some kind of SS thugs, entered, carrying void strips, and this time Dani screamed like a terrified old woman, “They’re going to hurt us! Nazis!” She released her magic, outside. Into the parking area.

In the employee parking lot, two cars exploded.

A guard slapped a void strip on her, and Dani dropped as if dead.

Mable

Mable watched as four patients were loaded onto gurneys. Sirens were blaring in the parking lot as firetrucks and police zoomed in. She wanted to run out and get the police to come in, arrest the staff, or get them to go into Building Z and check it out, but … no probable cause, and police would believe the staff and Devoe and not old people. That had always been the case. And … this was the plan, create havoc so Dani would get taken away.

“Fuck,” Marvin muttered, and gripped her hand. She gripped back, holding on for dear life.

“She’ll sleep this afternoon,” Zeddie said of Dani.

“Fuck,” Marvin said, tightening his grip on her.

Sandra shared quick glances with them, hers full of command, which shocked Mable. Sandra was not the commanding type. Or the Sandra she knew wasn’t.

The light-skinned black woman’s dark eyes demanded they gather behind Dani’s gurney. Together, they followed Zeddie as they all went to the inmates’ elevator–Zeddie, and the counselor to drop off Dani in her room, or so they said. Sandra, who suddenly appeared full of purpose and resolve, pushed her way into the elevator with Dani, her eyes like thunderclouds.

Zeddie and the counselor who had knocked Dani out looked confused. The counselor said, “Ma’am, you’ll need to take another elevator or wait until this one returns.”

Sandra stared them down, “I like that crazy old white woman,” she said, playing her role, pointing at the gurney. “I’m going to make sure she gets to her room.”

Mable pulled Marvin in too. The doors closed, leaving the six of them alone; five standing people–three of them magical practitioners, and two of them voids–and Dani, lying under a sheet.

“What happens to her now?” Mable asked.

Zeddie looked at her quickly in the reflective metal and away.

The counselor, Deborah, according to her nametag, said, “She’ll be evaluated. She sounded paranoid in the dining room. It’s possible that she’s had some kind of mental break. If so, she’ll be moved to a different facility. The Sevens isn’t equipped to handle people in that condition.”

Mable frowned. Sandra looked down and whispered to Jesus. Marvin cursed again. All playing their parts, yet all being themselves. They had placed Dani in this position. If she was hurt, it was on them.

Mable

Mable sat on her toilet, in the only place in her room where there was no surveillance, holding her secret laptop, and pulled up pictures of her fake grandkids. She entered the encryption code making the photo dissolve into lines of computer code, and tapped the sequence that would execute part one of Program ABZ, or Attack Building Z. If the MTT worked, this should wake the tracking device.

Dani, if she was really out and her magic was still voided, could be found. If she was awake, she would feel the sting as the tracker went live. The plan was for her to lie still, let the small device do its first two jobs: perform a diagnostic on itself, and then send out a GPS for Dani’s location. Within five minutes Mable knew the device was working and had a GPS on her. Dani was no longer in her dorm room.

Dani already being gone made things harder, but she never expected things to be easy. Mable paused Program ABZ and opened a photo sent to her email from Tridevi’s office. Once she had it on her drive, she dissolved that photo. More code was buried there and she isolated the program she had worked on for weeks, ever since Zeddie had first smuggled in the small tablet, hoping that the Sevens’ IT team was too busy watching the replay of all the cameras to notice her stealthy incursions into their system.

Deftly, she inserted a single line of code into the IT team’s internal servers, and sent it searching. Another fifteen minutes later, she took over the security system, shut down the surveillance system for all the dorms, the teaching sections of the school, the grounds, and the basement. Not building Z. She couldn’t do that remotely. She needed to be there and plugged into a system to disable the servers there.

Initiating a final line of code, Mable opened all the locks on every dorm room door, and patted her laptop. It wasn’t a pretty purple like hers at home, but it had done good work. She was proud of it. For the moment, she had done all she could from the safety of her room.

She grabbed her bag of electronic goodies and high-tailed it out the unlocked door. In the hallway, she opened Dani’s door, just in case, but as she had expected, the room was empty. Dani was already gone. Her friend was in danger.

Marvin

Tridevi met in the basement utility closet, the same basement Marvin figured Dani had been transported through, unconscious and unable to defend herself, the same closet he and Mable had hidden in. He passed out scrubs to each of them from the stash he had discovered on that rendezvous, that had combined fun and business. Silent, they turned their backs on each other, put on the nursing uniforms, and clipped on fake IDs. Even Sandra.

When he was dressed, he turned around. “I thought you were staying here to be our backup,” he said to Sandra, who was staring at her fake ID.

“I’ve been—” She stopped and looked into the distance in the small room. It was a thousand-yard stare, an expression he had seen when he was in the service, on the faces of Marines who had seen too much, done too much, or lost too much.

Sandra took a slow breath and said, “I’ve been sitting on my backside too long as it is, waiting on the Lord to fix my life.” She pulled her gaze back to his. “I’m going with you.”

Marvin patted her on the back, a single quick pat, like he might to his grandson. It was part pride and part encouragement. Until today, Sandra had been mostly the mousy, quiet, forensic accountant at Tridevi. This Sandra he was seeing was probably the real Sandra, the Sandra from before. Before magic had ruined her life.

She straightened her shoulders and said, “I overheard two construction workers talking when I slipped past the intersecting hallway. Afternoon classes have been cancelled, and we have a construction company, a window replacement company, and a plumbing company on site to fix the damage we helped cause. The damage to the building is widespread, though little was structural, except the crack in the wall from whoever set off the earthquake. They had to call in a structural engineer for that and he won’t be here until dark. That means things will be off kilter all afternoon, and the employees are already taking advantage of an extra day off from the inmates to play video games and gossip.” Sandra grinned unexpectedly, and it was a mischievous expression Marvin had never seen on her face. “Playtime won’t last. Not once they figure out Mable unlocked the doors.”

Mable said, “Good work, Sandra. That information helps a lot.”

Sandra beamed and nodded her head emphatically.

“We also have some big honcho from the IT company on his way here from somewhere,” Mable added. “We have two hours before he gets here.”

“Then what?” Marvin asked.

“And then he’ll spot the patch codes and all hell will break lose,” his ladylove said. “We have to be back here by then.”

“Right.” He kissed Mable’s forehead and saw a flash of pain cross Sandra’s face before she lifted her head and firmed her lips. She was technically a widow without a dead spouse. Had to suck. Maybe doing something constructive like saving Dani would help her. “We’ll get into Building Z,” he said, “find a place to park Mable, and then we’ll hunt down Dani.”

“Got it,” Mable said. “The employee dining room on the first floor would be perfect. There’s an access panel I can use in the corner, to the left of the door. I’ll be hiding in plain sight, working on my laptop, while y’all hunt Dani and the others. When do we go?”

He peeked out the utility room door into the basement. No one was around, so he held open the door and said, “Now’s as good a time as any.” They scurried out, through the garage and into the employee parking lot. Then they took the same walkway near the parking lot that the real employees always took from their cars to Z. No one stopped them.

The next test was whether the ID nametags he had stolen in the first week they were here, and that Mable had rigged, would work the locking system at the employee door. Before they got to the school, Mable had entered the team into The Sevens’ personnel system as traveling nurses working on six-month contracts and so far, no one had noticed or cancelled them. As long as no one asked them anything medical they should be fine. Should didn’t count for much in war.

Marvin led the way to the employee door. Mable went first, pulling out her ID badge on its retractable string, and running the card’s ID strip through the security slot. The door opened and they all slipped in.

The door locked securely behind them. Marvin wished it hadn’t sounded so fucking final.

Mable

As the door closed, Mable pointed straight ahead. “According to the original floor plans on file with the county codes office, the dining room is straight ahead. When I’m plugged in, y’all take the first right to the emergency fire stairs to which ever room, or rooms, I find.”

“Fucking stairs,” Marvin grumbled.

“If you had gotten your knees replaced when the ortho told you to, you wouldn’t be having trouble with stairs now,” Mable said, leading the way. Marvin grumbled some more, but Mable was right. She was always right about men. And computer code.

As if they belonged there, the three walked to the dining room, found it nearly empty, and claimed a table near the access panel in the corner.

Sandra said, “I’ll get us some coffee.”

“Remember our cover story,” Mable said. “And keep her busy until I get plugged in.”

Sandra

Sandra had never outright lied well, but fudging the truth was easier. She got two coffees and a tea—disgusting teabag—in foam cups, and paid for them. The cashier, a perky but suspicious dark-skinned woman said, “I haven’t seen you three before.”

“And I hope you never see us again,” Sandra said, sounding grouchy. She glanced at the woman’s nametag, “Shaniqua. I’m Sandra. They sent us over here to finish out our shifts. There was so much damage to our unit,” she nodded in the general direction of the main building, “when the students went nuts, we had to vacate our area so it can be inspected.”

The young woman’s eyes brightened, and she leaned in. That turned her back to the access panel and Mable jumped up to open the small metal door. In the confidential tone used by all excellent gossips, Shaniqua said, “I heard things exploded in the parking lot, the kitchen caught on fire, and the windows busted.”

“All true.”

Shaniqua’s eyes lit up just like a churchwoman hearing prime gossip.

Sandra lowered her voice. “Giiiirl, I kid you not. Two cars were melted to slag. A dozen others were damaged. The Sevens’ insurance is good for it, but what a pain for the car owners, you know?” Sandra added blueberry muffins to the coffees and the tea. Mable was still working. “Plus,” Sandra said, “a plumbing pipe busted and some of the dorms don’t have water or power, so the place is now in lockdown. Or it was until the automatic doors opened and some of the residents got lose …”

“Da-yam. What started it?”

“That cheap excuse for lemon cream pie they served. Some old woman got mad and started inciting to riot.” Sandra stopped, remembering the scene in the dining room. “I never thought I’d see anything like it. Pottery bustin’, plastic stuff turned into dirt, the safety windows cracked, some fires started, the students were screaming and attacking ...” She brought her attention back to the cashier and handed her a twenty. “It was kinda scary.”

Mable sat back down and gave her a thumbs up.

“I bet,” Shaniqua said, making change. “The old folk we get over here are brain-dead so we don’t have to worry about them attacking us. Safer, you know?”

Sandra nodded. “I’m just working a contract here, but after this, maybe I should think about a transfer. They said it could take as much as two more hours to complete the inspection of our unit, so they sent our supervisor over with some work she can do here.” She nodded at Mable and lowered her voice even more. “I wanted to go home with pay, but you know how they are. Our supervisor told us to check in with the director of nursing and get put to work here. But I’m getting a coffee break first, you know?”

“Yep. Like, ‘You on the clock? You stand there even if the dining room be empty.’ Like my legs don’t ache.”

“Preaching to the choir.” They fist bumped and Sandra went back to the table. The three drank bad coffee and weak tea, ate stale muffins, and murmured quiet platitudes and nonsense as Mable worked. While they chitchatted, Sandra repeated the discussion with Shaniqua. She hadn’t told a single lie, and yet she hadn’t told the full truth either. This must be the way politicians got their start. Innocent falsehoods. Sandra was equally horrified and smug that she had pulled it off.

Fifteen minutes later, Mable muttered, “Got several possible choices that fit with the MTT’s coordinates. Rooms 410, 413, 501, and 506 all seem to be newly activated.” She flapped her hand at them and said loud enough for Shaniqua to hear. “Go. Check in at fourth and fifth floors. I’ll be here working.”

Sandra and Marvin stood and made their way out the door into the hallway. Quietly, Sandra said to Marvin, “I’ll take four. Be careful.” Marvin nodded and headed to the elevators. Sandra took the stairs. In her pockets were two of Marvin’s Invader devices, assorted pens, and a single fob that would alert Mable if there was trouble. Mable could kick butt if she got in a tight spot and Marvin was a big guy. He could likely get away. Short of turning attackers into emus, Sandra was helpless. But she was going to do something this time, and not sit on her behind and do nothing. Not anymore.

Marvin

Marvin stood just inside the unit’s doors, watching. Every person was pushing a little portable computer cart around, eyes on their screens, fingers tapping. The woman behind the desk was probably the charge nurse and she was either really busy or was avoiding making eye contact with her nursing personnel. Marvin was betting the latter.

He grabbed an empty cart and swiped his ID card into the reader. It came on and his name appeared at the top. Well, part of his name. Marvin, but Marvin Finklehopper, RN. He grinned at the name. Finklehopper was a frog in some children’s books. Mable was trying to make him laugh. Confidently, he pushed the cart down the hallway, and not one person looked his way. His old training in the Marines still paid off, every damn day.

He entered room 501 and closed the door behind himself.

Sandra

Sandra found their client in room 410. Franzen Rubin Van Dijk was lying on his left side, facing the door. The cables that harvested his magical energies were plugged into a neurological port on the back of his head, much like someone had said during the riot in the dining room. The movie with the guy who did the internet stuff in virtual reality. What’s his name. The guy from the movie Speed. She and Harold had really liked that movie. Sandra Bullock had been fantastic.

Franzen did not look like the Speed guy in the virtual reality movie, except for his port. The back of his skull had been fitted with a black plastic disc, into which three small wires were plugged, and the wires were looped on a large hook behind his head, before they disappeared into the wall. Franz looked like a weathered, starving old man, hairless, his skin so smooth over his bones, it was shining. He had a feeding tube, a catheter, and two IVs. And his breath, through open lips and his slack mouth, smelled slightly yeasty.

Sandra plugged in the Invader linkage nodule to an empty AC wall socket, turned it on, and waited for the little light on the side to turn green. Green meant Mable had recognized the device down in the break room, and was busy turning down the drugs that were keeping Franz comatose. She was also monitoring the client’s vitals. They couldn’t just turn off the drugs. Withdrawal would be a horror. But they could start weaning the patient off.

He had been missing for over six weeks. He had a port in the back of his skull. Franzen was in a bad way.

Sandra left the room.

Room 413 was one of the people from Table J. Her name was Beulah Mae Ettinger, a tan black woman with weaves in her hair. Sandra plugged in her small device, waited until it lit up green, and left the room without incident, taking the stairs fast, to the fifth floor. That had to be where Dani was.

Marvin

Marvin was hard to miss, tended to stand out in a crowd. So when he stepped into room 501 unobserved, he whooshed out a huge sigh of relief. He shoved his nurse rolling cart-laptop-stand-thing into the corner and plugged in his little tracker Invader thingamabob and watched the tiny green light come on. Mable had recognized the device and was doing her thing.

He had invested his earnings from the recycling contract in a variety of startups, and the MTT had already made him a fortune. Now it was going to help Tridevi rescue a lot of people. The press from a rescue would make him even richer.

The man in the bed, eyes closed, breathing steadily, was Buck Hackenmeister, the supposedly dead guy from yesterday. He didn’t have a port in his head yet, but he was out cold. Buck had turned his wife into a boa constrictor. Poor guy. Though Marvin could have used that talent when his second wife divorced him. She was a snake through and through, and the poetic justice would have been perfect.

Marvin slipped to the door and peeked out. The hallway was clear and he pushed his little cart out, into the hallway, and toward room 506, his eyes taking in the location of every person, and where each site of egress was. He slipped in and whooshed out another relieved breath. This was harder than sneaking from dorm room to dorm room when he was in college and wildly popular with the coeds. He pulled back the sheet. The woman on the hospital bed was Dani and she was alive, wearing a purple patient gown, her steel gray hair a tangled mess. He attached the MTT to the wall and waited for the green light.

When it appeared, he lifted Dani’s arm and spotted the super-glued incision Sandra had made. He squeezed the skin, and felt the clicking sensation that meant the MTT had been fully activated. It was now mated with the Invader, and between the two, Mable could override the IV’s programing for opioids, collect vitals, track the patient, record everything said in the room, and transmit all the data to Tridevi’s office.

The MTT and Invader devices were his pride and joy.

The lights on the IV cart went dark. His little devices were working. Dani hadn’t been drugged long enough to have to go through withdrawal. She should wake fairly soon. With one hand, Marvin kinked the line carrying opioids, and with the other, he squeezed the IV bag, forcing fluids through the remaining line into her. Not enough to cause problems, but enough to start flushing her system of the drug.

Ten minutes later, Dani woke, blinked, and tried to focus on his face. She frowned furiously and when she tried to talk, her words slurred. He spotted a foam cup of water and held the straw to her lips. It took a few tries but finally her lips closed around it and she drank. When she turned her head to indicate she was done, she said, “There’s no way I got drunk enough to go home with you. But I’m hungover as crap.”

He blew out a relieved breath. “We didn’t spend the night together. Though that would be a night you would never forget.”

“I’d roll my eyes, but I’m afraid I’ll puke.”

Quickly, he reminded her of the case, and she nodded her head very slightly, as if trying to wake up without vomiting.

“Okay. Okay,” she said after another few minutes. “I’m awake. I’m still full of drugs, but I’m awake. And I remember. I think.”

Behind him the door opened. Marvin whirled, his fists coming up. But it was just Sandra.

“You try to crawl in bed with my best friend, and you know what’ll happen, right?” Sandra said.

“You’ll tell Mable and she’ll rip off my Mr. Wonderful. I remember.”

“Good to see you awake, Dani.” She leaned over and hugged Dani hard. “I can’t lose my best friend.” She stood and took Dani’s hand. “You’re cold. You need a blanket.”

“I need to puke.” Dani frowned, and lifted her eyes. She looked at Sandra with an odd expression. “Wait. I’m your best friend?”

Sandra frowned. “Of course you are. I love you. Anyway, I found our client. You were right. Room 410.”

“I love you too,” Dani whispered.

Marvin, uncomfortable to his bones, needed to lighten the mood. “I love y’all too. Sooo… a threesome?”

The two gals looked at each other with matching annoyance. Good. That was better than all the girly shit.

“Okay. Leave me,” Dani said. “I’ll pretend to be asleep. The machine will record and transmit everything said in the room, and by morning we’ll have enough to shut this place down.”

“We’re outta here.” Marvin cracked open the door, saw the coast was clear, and he and Sandra sedately left the room, Marvin pushing his small cart.

Mable

Using the distraction of a brand new dining room window slipping out of the installer’s hands and crashing to the ground, getting back into Dorm Delta was a piece of cake. They gathered in Marvin’s room, drank real coffee, good tea, and had Zeddie deliver a bottle of wine—for a hefty fee. Hours passed as Mable monitored the activity in the school building and in the Building Z rooms, and kept the IT security department scrambling. She had them convinced that some of the escaped magic had corrupted the system. That was brilliant, even if she had to say it herself.

She continued to decrease the four patients’ meds, and sent the recordings of all the spoken activity in Dani’s room to the Tridevi clerk who was running the shop and amassing the evidence. The kid looked like she was twelve but she had graduated near the top of her class from Furman U., so she must be good.

Now that she had a way in, Mable was having fun playing games against the IT techs. She had been able to keep the IT department and all the monitoring systems shut down, by triggering a single line of code, over and over again. And Tridevi’s small team was also able to check long-ignored emails, texts, and messages, without being caught, and even talk on Zoom to the kids in the office. For the next fourteen hours, they slept and worked in shifts, monitoring the activity in Dani’s room. At six a.m., however, there was a problem.

Sandra

Mable said, “Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Sandra rolled over and nearly fell off the sofa.

Marvin came out from the small bedroom, asking, “What’s happening?”

“Someone in Dani’s room said they’re prepping Dani for surgery. I’ve notified our client’s family and our contact with the local police, but they have to wait for a subpoena. They won’t get here fast enough. So I called Marcus Mattinger and got him out of bed, but still, we’re looking at an hour at least.”

“Mattinger? The state supreme court judge?” Marvin asked, coming fully awake. “You know him?”

Mable didn’t reply, stretching and looking away delicately.

Sandra cleared her throat, trying to make the sound tactful and yet pointed.

“Oh,” Marvin said. “Before you met Mr. Wonderful again.”

Mable pursed her lips but didn’t look at Mr. Wonderful’s owner.

Marvin started the coffeemaker and went to brush his teeth. He wasn’t the jealous type, which was good, with Mable’s history.

Sandra made tea and poured a cup of coffee for Mable. The computer whizz murmured thanks and kept typing on the laptop. Sandra stayed quiet and let her work.

When Marvin returned, he looked ready for work, wearing the sky-blue scrubs the medical types wore. He kissed the top of Mable’s blonde head and said, “Okay, so you need to turn off the electricity in the surgical suite. Right?”

“I can’t,” Mable said. “It is in a different part of Building Z. And every department of Z has its own backup generator.”

“So what do we do?” Sandra asked, finishing off her tea. “We can’t let them perform surgery on Dani.”

“I’ll go in after her, but Mable needs to stay here and monitor the situations in both buildings. You can’t go with me, honey,” Marvin said.

“Without me, things might be dicey,” Mable said, her eyes on the screen. “You can turn things to soil but that might not be enough.”

“I’ll go,” Sandra said, the words out of her mouth before she even thought them.

The other two were silent long enough that Sandra figured they were going to refuse her. That possibility sent a strange confusion racing through her, the fear of her power, and the very unexpected desire to use it.

“If we get in trouble, you might have to… you know.” Marvin shrugged uncomfortably.

“Use your…” His words trailed off.

“Turn someone into an emu.” Sandra took her tea to the window and gazed out over the back parking lot and the petting zoo behind the school. Could she do it? On purpose? Her curse was exactly that. It had cursed her life, Harold’s life, had caused her children to grieve, and had hurt her church. She had lost friends who didn’t feel a relationship with her was worth the possibility of becoming a stupid, ugly, flightless bird. Not that she could blame them. Just like she had moaned in the dining room, she had lost her life.

Sandra’s power level was strong, off the chart when she was first measured. Strong enough to even overpower a void’s natural immunity. She had been encouraged to learn to use her power, but some unhappy subconscious part of her had always shut her magic down.

Mable went to freshen up and Marvin took her place at the laptop. It gave Sandra time to think, while he monitored the screens for any changes.

Sandra pressed her teabag into the bottom of the empty cup with a finger, worrying, watching the small barn at the petting zoo. The barn manager let Harold out to run, and she smiled tenderly. He’d had long skinny legs as a human too.

When Mable came back in, Sandra left them alone and went to Marvin’s bathroom. Before she closed the door, she saw Mable sit at the laptop, looking perky and pretty, every blonde hair in place. “What do you think she’ll do?” she asked.

Marvin said, “I don’t know. But I also don’t know if I can rescue Dani in time without her. Without getting taken down, too.”

Sandra closed the door softly. They had all managed to get showers during the night, so clean up was easy and quick. She brushed her teeth, smoothed her hair, and put on fresh lipstick. That was all the makeup she had ever worn, that and a little rouge, and Harold had loved her natural, light skin. She studied herself in the mirror again. She looked okay. Gray headed. Old. Tired. Late nights did that these days. Harold would never recognize her now.

And…

She might have to turn someone else into an emu. She had sworn never to use her magic again. But to save Dani … She heaved a guilt-ridden breath. Yes. God forgive her. She would use her curse for Dani. Her best friend in the world. Dani had saved her. Had bullied her out of her intense depression after Harold’s transformation and made her go to work. She owed Dani. Her best friend, or BFF as the kids said these days.

Sandra straightened her shoulders, whispered a prayer for forgiveness, and changed into fresh scrubs that matched Marvin’s and Mable’s. She clipped her nametag to her collar and tested its retractable string before she returned to the main room of Marvin’s suite. “Anyone who tries to hurt Dani will be eating emu food for breakfast.”

Marvin stood and said, “Mable is going to monitor our progress and handle communication with the cops from here. Let’s go.”

Sandra sucked in a shocked breath. Now?

Silent, fear racing through her blood with every heartbeat, Sandra followed him from the room and down the hall. Down the elevator. Into the basement. And across the parking lot. The construction guys had not yet shown up for the day’s final repair work, but the sleepy-eyed first shift was just arriving and they fell in with the group. The medical personnel looked as tired as she felt. Considering what Mable had recorded about the hazmat-wearing transport crew, most of them probably had no idea they were treating people who had been removed and disappeared.

Dani had said that the higherups had to know. The paper pushers. But the lower paid people didn’t have to know. The surgeons didn’t have to know, only the anesthesiologist who would put them into partial comas upon entering Building Z, and keep them that way until they were put under fully in the operating room. Even most of the nurses might not know. They probably thought, just like Shaniqua had said, that they were working on brain damaged patients who had donated their bodies and power with the intent to provide for their families by allowing the harvesting of their magic.

But. The COO, Margorie Devoe, had to know. The head of security had to know. A few others. There were probably ten or fifteen people who knew they were abusing and assaulting and doing unspeakable things to people.

Money talked. And the root of all evil was the love of and the dependance on money, making more money, and stealing more money.

Tridevi had the proof. But before they could rescue all the inmates in Building Z, they had to get Dani to safety.

Marvin slid his fake nametag through the slot and they were inside in minutes, climbing the stairway. All the other staff were using the elevators so the stairwell was empty, though echo-y.

Sandra repeated the last instructions Mable had given. “We get to Dani, barricade ourselves in a room with her, and you start turning equipment to dirt.”

“And Dani, if she’s alert, will start blowing things up again.”

Sandra hoped Dani was awake. It would make things a lot easier than dealing with a hospital full of dirt.

“But … if someone gets into the room with us, and if you can’t … stop them …” Her last words whispered into silence.

“Then, dear lady,” Marvin said gently, “you have a choice to make. Do nothing and hope that law enforcement gets to us first, or turn any armed security into emus.” His face was sad, as if he was going through her trauma with her.

“I understand that,” she said, her throat dry and her palms sweaty. “But I’ll need you to tell me when. Because I can’t just, you know, do it by myself.” Tears burned under her lids.

“Will do, Sandy.”

“I hate that name,” she snapped.

Marvin glanced back at her and grinned. “I know.”

Sandra huffed a disgusted breath, but her tears dried up. She scowled at him. Marvin was a nasty-mouthed cracker, but he was also wise. He knew she needed to be annoyed, not coddled. Annoyance would give her courage, while kindness would make her tear up. Annoyance was better.

She wished she had an antacid. Her stomach was burning with anxiety. And then she realized Marvin wasn’t cussing. There was something about the way he was moving up the stairs. Purposeful. Quiet. And he wasn’t griping about his knees. He was breathing deeply, steadily, as if… Right. Marvin had seen battle back in the seventies. With Marvin groaning on the last twenty steps, they left the fire stairs and entered the hallway.

Sandra blew out her worry and pulled her magic to her, the way they had tried to teach her in her first magic school, back when she had first transformed Harold. Back then she’d had a block, an emotional obstruction to using her magic. But after all this time, and the fresh exercises taught by the staff at The Seven’s, she could feel her power humming under her skin. If she had to use her curse to save Dani, she knew how, theoretically. She had never used her curse on purpose before. Never. Not once.

But for Dani, maybe God would forgive her.

Marvin

Marvin stopped at the fifth floor and took a slow breath to rest his aching knees. He pulled his power to him. It gathered, not something he could see, but something he could feel, like a low-pitched buzzing under his skin, a sense of invincibility. He wasn’t invincible, but … he could do things with his curse that no one knew about. There had been that one time when a thug attacked him in a parking garage.

He knew what the guy had seen. Old man, in the dark, alone. A white-headed guy who couldn’t fight back. Right? Just walk up to him and take his wallet. Maybe stick a knife in his ribs just for fun. Except he had picked the wrong old man. When the thug pulled his knife and demanded Marvin’s money and jewelry, Marvin had stopped, drawn in his power, and cussed his curse spell. All the cameras broke into garden soil. Then he altered the spell. Just a little. And the guy in front of him dissolved into dirt too.

Marvin had stood there, staring at the pile of dirt. Then he had kicked the dirt away, revealing the guy’s knife, his belt buckle, and the little metal rings that his shoelaces had once passed through. There was also some cash. No plastic ID. No leather shoes or wallet. Nothing was left to ID him except the prints on the knife hilt. Marvin had pocketed the cash, used his hanky to lift the knife, and gotten into his car. Later he had carefully wiped off the knife and tossed it into the library book return box. There was no camera monitoring the box, and it wasn’t like he could turn the blade in to the cops.

He had survived, twelve dollars richer, and a lot smarter.

Marvin knew that if he used his most powerful spell, he could turn everything made of plastic and everything made of beef, like the meatloaf, to garden soil. And if he got mad enough, he could transform people too. His talent was precise, easy to target, but there was always the potential for mistakes if he got cornered. He hoped no innocent people got hurt.

He peeked out the stairway door. The hallway in front of the nurse’s station was full of medical people—nurses, technicians, aides, probably doctors too, though these days they all dressed alike. He preferred the days when nurses wore those cute white dresses, white stockings and shoes, and a hat that looked like half of a milk carton on their heads. Sexy.

Dani’s door was out of sight, around the corner. “Stay close,” he said to Sandra.

“Yes.”

The single word was breathy, as if she was about to pass out. If so, the stairway was not a safe place for her to land. She could break her neck. He looked back at her, but her face was set in firm lines, solid, sure. Marvin gave her a nod, held his magic close to his chest, and strode from the fire stairs. Mable followed right behind. Marvin took a right at the nurses desk and spotted Dani’s room just ahead. The door was open.

Dani was on a stretcher, being wheeled into the hallway by a short, muscle-bound attendant. Beside him was a big burly redheaded white guy with a nose ring, and wearing a black security uniform. The security guy wasn’t a void; he had magic. A security guy who could toss spells. A magic user who used his power against old people, old magic geezers.

He had to act fast. Marvin pointed a finger at the floor beneath Dani’s gurney and whispered, “Fuckety.”

The synthetic rubber tires on the stretcher dribbled away into dirt and the gurney dropped an inch to land with a small thump. The floor tiles beneath it crumbled to dirt too. Quickly he pointed a finger at three rolling data carts down the hall and said it again. They crumbled into soil.

“What the hell!” the nose ring guy said. He started looking around for the source of the magic.

With careful control, Marvin waved his hand in a small arc in front of himself and Sandra, and to the side of Nose Ring, and murmured, “Fuckety fuck.” Everything made of elastic and synthetic and leather crumbled away. All the employees’ shoes and underpants and bras and some of the clothing that had a low cotton content became dirt and fell to the floor.

There were screams and people grabbed at their clothing.

Marvin raced in, ready to grab Dani off the stretcher. He intended to carry her to the stairwell, but the guy with the nose ring reached out to grab his shoulder. There was power in his hand, raw, blazing power. “Fuckety,” Marvin said out loud. But his attention had been on Dani, not fully on the guy and instead of turning the security guy to dirt, the wall behind him crumbled away. The spell had brushed by Nose Ring and hit the wall.

The guy stepped back, his eyes wide. He shook his whole body like a wet bulldog to rid himself of the traces of Marvin’s spell. But he didn’t turn to dirt.

Instead, Nose Ring threw out his hand and hit Marvin square in the chest with a magic taser. Electricity lit up Marvin’s body. The world tilted. He was falling.

Throwing his last ounce of power, he whispered, “Fuckety fuck fuck,” and hit the security guy in his nose ring. Marvin landed on Dani. The world went dark.

Sandra

Sandra watched Marvin’s magic lash out, silent, transforming shoes, clothing, and medical equipment into soil. And then the feeling of incredible power building fast. There was another magic user here. And it was far from the familiar sensation of Marvin’s magics; this magic was hot and razor sharp.

Marvin cursed. The wall behind the magic user crumbled into dirt.

The security guard at the end of the stretcher threw out his hand.

Marvin collapsed on top of Dani. The security man screamed. Fell silent. And stared at his left arm. It was crumbling into rich good garden soil. Dani tried to sit up. Tried to pull her magic to her. But someone must have given her a booster directly into her IV. Her eyes were drugged and dazed. There were too many medicines in her system for Dani to a help.

Sandra had to act.

But her magic was a claylike lump of hard uselessness inside her. What her first teachers had labeled as fear. Fear. Yes. She was terrified.

But Sandra moved through the chaos to the other end of Dani’s bed, away from the one-armed magic user, and pulled the heavily laden gurney—or what was left of it—back into Dani’s room. She shut the door on the chaos of the hallway. The door had a latch. She figured it was easily unlockable from the hallway, but she turned it anyway.

Dani was still trying to move, still trying to gather her magic, but it wasn’t coming. Moving on some kind of automatic reflex, Sandra pulled Marvin off of Dani and lowered him to the floor. Well, tried to. Her back, which hadn’t twinged in months, spasmed tight, so it was more like providing a cushion for his head with her hands when he landed. Then she folded the IV line into a kink to shut off the last of the drugs. Aloud, she said, “Mable. We’re in Dani’s room. Marvin’s been hit with a spell and he’s drooling on the floor. Dani’s coming back awake but her magic is doped up again. There’s a finger latch between us and a magic user whose left arm is now made of dirt. Get me help!”

Sandra spotted some tape on a shelf and removed Dani’s plastic IV needle, happy to see that Marvin’s spell had missed the plastic attached to and inside of her friend. There was no gauze so she folded a tissue and held it in place over the bleeding hole and wrapped the tape around Dani’s arm. She gave Dani a few sips of water and dumped the rest of the cup over Marvin’s face. He cursed as he struggled to wake up fully. Then cursed some more when he finally sat upright on the floor. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“It worked, didn’t it? Get up. You need to get it together. You just turned some thug’s arm to dirt. We’re out of the closet and I have a feeling it’s about to get busy in here.”

“The guy,” he groaned, placing a hand on his chest. “Nose Ring. He had magic.”

“A lot of magic,” Sandra said, putting her ear against the door. “He zapped you.” She glanced at his pants. “You don’t wear pull up protection, do you?”

“No?”

“Shouda, wouda, coulda.”

Marvin looked down. “I peed my pants. Son of a bitch.”

“You could be, I guess,” Sandra said. “I never met your mama. It’s too quiet out there.”

Marvin spluttered as if he had never heard her make a joke. Maybe he never had. Maybe she didn’t make jokes anymore.

“It’s too quiet for Mable to be on the way. We’d hear things,” Dani said, sitting up on her ruined stretcher. She fingered the dirt beneath her. “Who knew mattresses were mostly plastic?”

“Everything is mostly plastic,” Marvin said. “Crap never breaks down unless you have a magic spell and a lot of power to make it work. Everything currently made of plastic could be made out of hemp and revive the farming economy and improve the oxygen content of the atmosphere—”

“We heard it before, Marvin,” Sandra interrupted.

He rolled over to his hands and knees and grabbed one of the wall shelves to pull himself up. “Oh hell. My knees. I’m too old for this shit.”

Dani slid off the dirt gurney and held herself upright with both hands. “I’ma vomit,” she slurred.

Adjusting the position of her ear on the door, Sandra whispered. “Shhh. I hear something.”

Dani

Dani tried to gather her power, but it was like sucking water through a trick straw, one stuck with pin holes. Useless.

Marvin moved around the room to the window, took in the view, and met her eyes, shaking his head.

Mable wasn’t outside.

The big guy had been zapped. That could be really dangerous to old people. If she got zapped on top of all the drugs in her system, she’d be down for the count. Maybe dead. Their plan hadn’t included magic-using goons.

She tried again to draw up her magic, but nothing happened.

She was powerless, Marvin was still pressing his chest, and Sandra had never before used her power on purpose. And their rescue knight on a white horse was … Mable and her tiny dragons.

“Problems,” Sandra said. She backed away from the door. “They’re bringing in voids and a battering ram.”

Over Building Z’s emergency loudspeaker—the one used to call out codes when patients crashed—a voice said, “Code Red, dining room. Code Red, dining room. Code Red, dining room. This is not a drill. Code Red, dining room.”

It was Mable’s voice, breathless and hollow. As if she was running.

Dani tried again to pull up her power and this time it hurt. She had to stop for a while.

Marvin breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and did the same. He shook his head again. Neither of them were having any success.

“Code Heart, room 205. Code Heart, room 205. Code Heart, room 205,” Mable’s voice said.

Then, “Code SOB, room 312. Code SOB, room 312. Code SOB, room 312.”

SOB? Dani thought. Oh. Short of breath. Laughter tittered up through her tight throat. I’m pretty SOB myself right now.

Sandra

Her muscles were quivering, her breath short and fast as she backed away from the door. Whatever Mable was doing with the speakers and the codes, it wasn’t enough. The security team was ready to break down the door.

“Oh. Oh nonono.” She began to pull up her power. “No no. Dear God, please stop them. Please stop them. Oh no. Please stop them. Please—”

A crash knocked her back.

The door rammed open. Slammed against the wall.

Black-suited figures rushed in. They had magic. So much magic.

Sandra released her power at them.

It shuddered through her. Whipped her spine. Blasted out of her gut and down her arm to her fingers. It struck the line of jack-booted thugs.

Power blasted into them.

So much power it was like fire, hot and burning. It ricocheted over them and into the wall.

Overhead, the lights blinked several times and went off.

Smoke blew through the air with the smell of burning feathers.

Soft, odd grunting sounds filled the room.

Emus appeared out of the smoke.

In a panic, small-brained, long-necked birds stomped off their boots and flung their clothes away. Spread their short wings and grunted loudly. Then they started booming, the sounds caught in the small room, reverberating as they raced in circles and then strode, long legs reaching. The wild mob raced down the hallway, claws clacking on the floor. They pecked at everything that moved.

Sandra sank to the floor, trembling with shock, tears on her face. “Dear God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She burst into racking sobs. Dani slid to the floor beside her and held her as she cried.

Mable

Mable stepped inside the outer door and tripped a black-uniformed guard, bringing her fist across the side of the woman’s neck as she fell. She darted toward the elevators and caught a glimpse of medical types at the entrance to the dining room, some carrying fire extinguishers, all looking confused. She turned and raced up the flight of stairs.

By the time she reached the first landing, her heart was pounding. Her knees ached and felt like small swords were stabbing into them. She broke into a sweat. Thank God for sex or I’d be out of shape. She started up the second flight. Stopped. Breathed. Okay. Maybe I need real cardio.

Two minutes later, her breath finally slowed. There was no way she could do this—save her friends—with brute force. Not even with her martial art abilities and skills.

She went back down the stairs and pulled her power to her. Hot and burning. The stink of brimstone and terror. The ancient human memory of ripping claws, rows of slicing teeth, piercing fangs. Wings spread. Feathers vibrant and rich and tipped with barbs. She opened the outer door and saw birds at the birdfeeder. There were more birds wheeling high overhead. Buzzards. She had never tried to turn buzzards.

She focused her power. “Here there be dragons,” she said, and sent her spell flying directly at the birdfeeder. Tiny dragons began to pop into existence around the birdfeeder. Three. Seven. Nine in all. Looking into the sky, she whispered her incantation and the buzzards gilding overhead snapped into dragons. Yes. Two of the buzzards were gold. The goldies were the queens, just like in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern world. They’re the dangerous ones, she thought. They don’t always come.

“Come,” she whispered to all the birds, putting all her power into the request. And come they did. Mable held the door open and they whipped inside, then followed her into the stairwell.

Mable started back up the stairs. She slowed, stopped several times, and finally at the third floor, she rolled against the wall, blowing hard, her heart slamming inside her chest. “I’m not fifty anymore,” she gasped. A dozen breaths later, she rocked her head back and said, “Okay. I’m not sixty anymore either. Damn it.”

The dragons were zooming up and down the stairwell. They made the most amazing peeps and trilling calls. They were having a ball.

When she had her breath back, she continued up the stairs and cracked open the door to the hallway with all the commotion. The place was a mess.

“Shoot fire at anyone in a black uniform,” she said to her dragons. “Herd them into rooms. And if any of them try to hurt you, cook and eat them. They’re yours.”

The two queens raised their heads and trilled-roared, the sounds too deep for the long, narrow throats. Their mouths gushed flames.

Slow, predatory, Mable pushed open the stairway door and stepped into the hallway. Dragons flew through behind her, shooting flames from their mouths. Small fires started everywhere.

People in scrubs were suddenly darting here and there, in a panic. Screaming.

Mable, queen of the dragons, raced down the hallway, preceded by red, green, blue, and gold mini-dragons. She pulled a fire alarm as she ran. The wail rose, hurting her ears. The dragons flew around a corner and instantly darted back. Cowering. Hovering behind her.

She stopped. A mob of emus raced across the hallway intersection ahead, along the hallway, long, hairy, bony legs striding. Stumpy wings flapping uselessly. Beaks clacking and grunting. a weird booming hurt her ears.

The tiny-brained birds disappeared, and an instant later some raced back.

Sandra. Sandra had used her power.

“Well, dang.” Mable blinked. “Four of you round up the birds,” she said to her dragons. “You may not believe it but you’re smarter and more powerful than they are.”

The two queens trilled and looked at each other, then at the stampeding birds.

“Put ’em behind the nurses desk. The rest of you, herd the people wearing black clothes in with them.”

The dragons flashed away.

In short order, the emus were in a tight mob in the small space, pecking and snapping and grunting at each other. And one man dressed in black, his pants smoking, his sleeve in flames, raced by, pursued by dragons. He barricaded himself in a storage room. Mable had a good laugh over that.

From outside, she heard the mixed sirens of firetrucks, police, and ambulances.

Some first responders wore black. “Dang.”

Mable sat on the floor, the wall at her back, legs out in front of her. She had seldom been able to practice with her power, so she had only done this once and it had taken everything out of her. Better to be sitting.

She called her babies to her. The dragons flashed close and fluttered around her, the two queens settling on her shoulders, ignoring each other. The other dragons rested on her legs and arms, and on the floor around her according to a pecking order she had never understood. “Fire-breathing stops. We won. Good dragons. Fresh meat for supper.” The queens preened.

Sandra

The FBI, SBI (State Bureau of Investigation), FeBMA (Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs) and various local fire and law enforcement agencies made nuisances of themselves all day. They blocked traffic, had to get into every room and start the identification process of every patient, carted away dozens of computers, confiscated dozens and dozens of cell phones, questioned every employee in what they called a prelim Q and A, held multiple press conferences, and tried to blame Tridevi for the situation.

When one intrepid cop tried to bully and arrest Sandra, she stared him down and said, “Those evil men attacked me. Being attacked makes me lose control of my magic. I suggest that, unless you deliberately want to cause me to lose control, you treat me with respect, young man. Or wear feathers. Your choice.”

He could have arrested her for communicating a threat to a law enforcement officer, but instead he found someone else to intimidate.

In the quiet after his departure, Sandra found a moment to approach an emu and study him carefully. Then she stretched out her hand and touched the bird, releasing her power in a slow coil. Her magic wrapped around him, soothing him. Several minutes later, a naked human plopped to his backside on the floor, and instantly covered his genitals.

She had done it. She had reversed her emu curse.

Tears gathered and fell from her eyes. Harold… I can save Harold.

She patted the confused and embarrassed man on the head and wandered into an empty patient room. There was a blanket on the bed. She gathered it in her arms and walked slowly between the law enforcement types and down the stairs. Across the walkway to the school. And around back to the petting zoo. No one stopped her.

Harold flapped his wings and raced to her in excitement. At the fence he stopped and pecked at her pocket, his beak stabbing her. “Ouch, stop that,” she said laughing. “I don’t have anything for you, sweetheart. Except this.” She gathered her power and let it swirl around her. Delicate and rich, the color blue and the scent of basil and allspice. She hadn’t known that her power was beautiful. She sent it curling to Harold.

Her magic twisted around his head, down his long neck, and began to twine into the feathers and around his body. Somewhere around his hips it broke into two strands and dropped around his legs, coiling to the ground.

A dozen heartbeats later, Harold coalesced out of the magic and the emu feathers, and sat hard, on the ground. Stunned. Confused.

Sandra wrapped a blanket around him and sat on the dusty zoo ground, wrapping her arms around him. Tears were streaming down her face.

Oddly, there was a naked human woman a few feet away. Sandra was pretty sure there had been a boa constrictor laying there a moment ago.

It took a moment for the fact to seep in. Her magic had freed another person from a third person’s curse.

That wasn’t possible.

It was completely impossible for one magic practitioner to reverse another’s magic.

But she just had.

Oh. Oh my.

“Sandra?” Harold asked. “Why am I naked? In a barnyard?”

“Sweetheart, I have a long story to share.”

“You!” a voice shouted. “Stop! Stop. Freeze! Police!” He had a gun out. Pointing it at two naked people and a petting zoo full of animals.

With a flick of her magic—not her curse—Sandra turned the terrified young cop into an emu.

Dani

Judge Marcus Mattinger showed up shortly after the cop was transformed. Mable’s old flame helped sort things out, explaining to law enforcement that Tridevi had led the investigation and brought down The Sevens’ entire operation. Once Marcus was on the scene, Tridevi’s lawyer got the charges against Sandra dropped. It hadn’t been difficult. The cop’s service weapon had not been holstered. He had drawn his gun for no reason at all except panic. Marcus had even demanded an apology from the local sheriff for the incident as part of Sandra agreeing to turn the cop, along with rest of the emus, back to human.

The apology had been politely—if coldly—delivered.

After that, things with the law went much more smoothly, and Mable had introduced her old flame to Dani. It turned out that Marcus was a lonely widower. Over coffee in the employee dining room of Building J, the judge asked Dani out to dinner. She stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Let’s get out of here and find a nice steak place.’ Unless you’re a vegetarian? Or a vegan?”

Dani blinked. She didn’t date. Especially not Mable’s sloppy seconds. But … Marcus was kinda cute. He was a little shorter than she was, had dark eyes and very dark skin. He was bald and his head had a perfect shape. “I’ll—” She stopped. “Tridevi has a press conference. In an hour.”

“Steak tomorrow then. Coffee after you’re done here tonight?”

Dani asked, “Tomorrow? Tomorrow …” She met his eyes. His looked kind. “I eat steak,” she said, slowly. “Rare,” she warned.

“I like mine a little more cooked, but bloody beef doesn’t scare me. Nor do strong women who blow up cars.” He gave her a smile and Dani found herself staring at his mouth.

She blinked and looked past him, not sure what to say to that.

“Tomorrow it is,” he said, his smile widening. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

She nodded, not at all happy with the way she was feeling just now. Like a hormonal teenager with a new boyfriend.

“And that coffee as soon as the press conference is over. I’ll wait.” Marcus wandered off.

Dani

Once Tridevi was released from official custody, they gave a press conference and she, Mable, and Marvin, answered a lengthy Q and A by avid reporters and media people. Sandra had begged off, though the agency gave her the credit for all the lifesaving magic of returning emus and all the other animals back into people.

Sandra was a media hero. Sandra would be rich, if she decided to capitalize on her gift. But for now, Sandra and Harold were having a second honeymoon in a local five-star hotel, on a company credit card, with room service as a bonus. She deserved it. Without her brave use of her power, they would likely all be dead. And Sandra was getting a raise, fueled by the numbers of consultation appointments the agency clerks were taking in their absence.

Once night fell, and the excitement finally died down, Mable and Marvin took off to have wild sex somewhere, and Dani watched as the inmates at The Sevens were greeting families and headed home. In another parking lot, the patients in Building Z were being carted off by ambulance to real hospitals for real treatment under the care of doctors and nurses certified by FeBMA.

Tridevi had broken a major case.

The Sevens’ warden had been fingered by the anesthesiologist as the person running the harvesting operation, and Margorie Devoe had been placed under arrest, along with two neurosurgeons, four nurses, the anesthesiologist, and the entire magic-wielding security crew, especially the ones who had spent time as flightless birds.

Life was good.

Marcus wandered up, his hands in his pockets. He had nice eyes. Kind eyes. And they were on her.

“My husband was a lawyer,” she said when he got close. “And not the good kind.”

“You don’t like lawyers?”

“Not usually. And it’s too late for coffee.”

He nodded as if she had said something weighty and significant. “I don’t practice these days. I mostly wrangle lawyers and parse legalese.”

“And?”

“And there’s a little bistro, about twenty miles from The Sevens. I know for a fact that they have on hand a lovely bottle of Stag's Leap Cask 23, the 2017 vintage. Their cheese is handmade from milk produced by a local goat farm, and their bread is homemade at a local bakery to cleanse our palettes.”

The way he said Stag’s Leap sounded like a wine lover’s caress. A bottle usually went for $600.00 on a dinner menu. “You like wine?” Dani asked.

“I do, my lady. I do indeed. Are you interested in the Stag? Or perhaps I could lure you to my place and introduce you to my wine cellar.”

And that line had just enough heat to it to convince her he was interested in her.

Clearly, since he wandered off earlier, Marcus had researched her, probably talking to Mable. Now he was trying to impress her. It was working. And since she had talked to Mable about the judge, she couldn’t fault his tactics.

“Let’s take in the bistro tonight and see what happens about that wine cellar after dinner tomorrow night.”

The judge removed a hand from his pocket and used a small key fob to unlock a tiny red sports car in the parking lot. “Try not to explode my new toy.”

Dani laughed. “I’ll try, Marcus. But I’m not promising anything.”

---

The End