Friday. 2 PM

I got to the cafe right at two. A few people were milling about, but nobody that I recognized, so I ordered a drink and sat down.

A minute passed, and I checked my phone. I didn’t have any messages. Just in case, I opened up Matchbook and refreshed it. Nothing.

He’s probably running late. It’s fine.

The barista called out, “Lenny!” and when nobody else claimed it, I stood up and stepped towards the counter.

“Is that an iced coffee, extra cream?”

The barista glanced at me, nodding. “Yeah, that’s yours.”

“Right.” I took the cup, scrolling on my phone as I navigated with my peripheral vision, towards a table. It was nice enough that I could have sat outside, but I’d said I’d be sitting inside, wearing a black motorcycle jacket, and that’s where I’d be.

Sitting down, I looked around the shop to make sure my date still hadn’t arrived, then I opened up a document on my phone and started working on the new article. It pretty much wrote itself, just filling in the facts of the dispute and the relevant quotes. I put in placeholders for the quotes, so I wouldn’t have to play back the recording in the cafe.

‘The store’s owner, Maggie Cartwright, objected to accusations of theft, saying’

I knitted my brow and looked over the text, tapping with my finger to select a section and delete it.

‘The store’s owner, Maggie Cartwright, had this to say on the matter.’

That felt better. I frowned over the next line, sipped my coffee, and considered how to continue.

“Levi?”

I looked up, surprised, putting down my phone. “It’s pronounced ‘Levi’, like ‘Chevy’, but, yeah. You’re Benjamin?”

Pulling up a chair, Ben nodded. He had on a T-shirt and jeans, so I didn’t feel too underdressed, though he’d put something in his hair to make it stand up, while mine was still tousled from wearing a helmet. Whatever it was in his hair, it smelled nice. “Nice to meet in person.”

“I didn’t see you come in,” I said. “Did you already order?”

“Yeah.” He was smiling. He had a nice smile, but there was something beyond that, and I tried to interpret the expression. Eyebrows raised, brow furrowed, it was like... he knew something I didn’t. “Levi Lawson, right?”

Oh. Oh no. I hadn’t put my last name on my account, which meant… “You googled me?”

“Not a lot of reporters named ‘Levi’ in the city,” Ben pointed out.

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Sipping my coffee, I started preparing an excuse to leave.

His smile didn’t falter. “Can I ask about it?”

“You already are,” I pointed out, checking my phone. If I had a text or email or something, I could use that. ‘Sorry, I have to go follow up on an article’ was a poor reason to go away, but it was at least a reason.

“Do you believe all the stuff you wrote in that article?”

And there it was, out in the open. He’d come here to gawk.

There was no reason not to be honest with him. “No.”

His face fell, disappointment clear. It was probably harder to ridicule me if he didn’t think I was a crackpot. “Then why’d you write it?”

Good news for him, then. “I didn’t. That story was gibberish. The real article, the one I wrote, got scrambled by a communications hex.”

“Oh?” His smile came back as I gave him something ridiculous to latch onto. “How does that work?”

I sighed. “You want the whole story?”

“Absolutely.” He sat forward to listen. “I really want to hear this.”

Before I could start, someone called his name from the bar, and he looked over his shoulder.

“That’s me. Just a second.”

He went to get his coffee, and I eyed the door. Ben had just come to get in a couple laughs. While he was gone, I could leave, block him on Matchbook, and get on with my day.

I tapped a finger to my temple, thinking a moment, then leaned back and committed to waiting. At this point, whatever fiction Ben was inventing in his head would be just as worthy of mockery as the truth. Might as well give him what he came here for.

Sliding back into his seat, Ben rested his elbows on the table, leaning on his hands to listen. “Alright. You said it was a hex?”

“I’ll get to that. This all started about a year and a half ago. Have you ever been at a party, and someone you don’t really know starts spinning a yarn about some conspiracy or another, and it sounds so convincing that you’re just about ready to believe them until the next morning when you’re sober and you’ve got a clear head and you realize it’s all a bunch of malarkey?”

Ben bobbed his head in agreement. “I don’t know if I’ve ever used the word ‘malarkey’, but go on.”

“This all started something like that. A couple colleagues were having a board game night, and some woman started talking to me about magic. At first, I thought she was talking about the card game, but the more she went on, the more I realized she was serious. She had good excuses for stuff, too: She said you couldn’t read about it online because there were ‘warlocks who make sure it all stays secret’. It’s sort of a secret society thing, I guess, to prevent everyone from just throwing magic around willy-nilly. They’re called the ‘United Commonwealth of Wizards’.”

I had to admit, it was kind of fun to tell the story to someone who hadn’t heard it before.

“So, you started digging,” Ben supplied. “And found out that magic was real?”

“More than that. I started digging and found out all sorts of stuff is real. You wouldn’t believe how much has been covered up.” I took a sip of my drink, preparing the next line of the story in my head. “I started by staking out usual places, spots that seem magic-adjacent. You know Noir, down in the west bottoms?”

He nodded. “I’ve heard of it, I think.”

“Turns out, they’re not in on it, but it let me overhear a couple things, and then I started staking out bookstores. This one had a chess table set up, so I made an excuse about learning to play, asked if I could use it, bought a couple books on theory, and then started watching.” I paused for dramatic effect, to draw him in.

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“How’d that turn out?”

“I upped my rating up to fourteen hundred,” I grinned.

The joke didn’t land, Ben just looked confused.

I kept going. “And I saw people buying books that weren’t on the shelves. Books about magic. Once I got that, I knew I was on the right track, and the rest was a matter of legwork. I tracked down a couple people I’d seen buying books, convinced one of them to let me interview him anonymously, used that to put together the whole picture, and the rest, well…” I shrugged. “I was convinced that I was going to win a Pulitzer for uncovering secrets about the universe, right up until I hit publish. Then, the shitshow started.”

He nodded, ready for the callback. “The hex.”

“The hex,” I confirmed. “I had sources. I had everything double and triple checked, recorded, I’d shown it all to my editor. He agreed to publish it as a headline piece, we got an image, had it ready to go. And when it came out, it wasn’t my article. Everything had been jumbled, made to sound like nonsense.”

“That’s what I read, then?” Ben asked, raising his eyebrows.

“It’s what everyone read, unless you got to the article within the first five minutes of publishing.” I sighed. This part of the story wasn’t as fun. “It went live how I’d written it, and then before I knew what was going on, it changed. My written sources all disappeared from company servers. All the contact info I’d been given vanished. I looked like the biggest conspiracy theorist this side of a hollow earth.”

He knew this part of the story from the public information, at least. “So you got fired.”

“Sort of. Officially, I got fired for submitting and publishing a fraudulent story, but that wasn’t really it. If it was just that, our fact checkers and editor would have been on the hook too.” Frowning, I took a sip of my coffee to buy myself a moment. “I got fired because I disappeared for a month.”

“Off chasing fairies?”

“In a mental hospital.”

“Oh.” He took a sip of his own drink, clearly because he felt as awkward as I did about it. “Erm…”

“Nominally, anyways,” I added. “Really, I got picked up and arrested by magic cops.”

“That sounds exciting!” He perked up, leaning forward. “Getting hunted down by wizards, on the run from the law, that had to be a thrill.”

“Not really. A couple folks from the council showed up at my apartment and asked me to go with them, I complied.”

Ben deflated, then tilted his head as he caught an apparent contradiction. “Wait, ‘council’? I thought you said it was a ‘commonwealth’?”

“The council is a section of them,” I explained. “It’s like… the judicial branch. Courts, law enforcement, prisons, all that is the council. Point is, they arrested me, and then they had to try and figure out what to charge me with. I’d basically thrown their whole way of life into chaos for about ten minutes, but since I didn’t know about their laws, there wasn’t really much that would stick. When they let me go, they contacted my job and said I’d had a meltdown and got institutionalized for a month while they gave me treatment.”

“I’m…” His smile faded, giving way to an expression I wasn’t totally sure I could read. I guessed it was uncertainty. Even if this was all just a kooky story that I was just making up, responding with laughter would probably have been inappropriate. “Sorry to hear that?”

“Oh, it was fine. Magic jail’s actually not much different than being institutionalized.”

That time he did chuckle, until he realized I wasn’t joking, and then there was a longer, even more awkward silence.

I kept the story moving. “But, in the long run, it all worked out. They decided since there was no malice behind my publication, I could just get probation. My old job knew I couldn’t technically be fired for having a mental break, not since I’d disclosed my diagnosis on the hire paperwork, so they said it was the article and kicked me to the curb. I got a decent severance check, at least.”

Ben looked uncertain, and this time I knew what he was thinking. It was an expression I’d seen before, and I knew it well enough to know how to respond.

“I’m on the autism spectrum,” I added, rolling smoothly past that part of the story. “Anyways. I’m on parole as long as I don’t break any more council rules. They let me start my new paper as long as I only distribute it to certified wizards who’ve been sworn to secrecy, and as long as I fill out a disclosure form on what I’m writing about every week. It’s better than getting my work hexed, and I don’t have to worry about being fired since I’m the editor in chief.”

“A local paper,” Ben commented. “That’s kind of a dinosaur, isn’t it? Kind of old? I don’t really see that being a growth industry.”

“It works.” I shrugged. “Wizards can’t use the internet to talk about spells openly, it’s barred by the commonwealth; I even have to list my paper as a ‘Variety/satire’ publication online and I can’t post what the content is out. A print paper provides utility they can’t get anywhere else.”

“And there’s enough wizards in Kansas City to justify a local paper like that?”

I didn’t particularly want to answer that question, so I sidestepped. “There’s enough people with a magic license, anyways. Most of them just use it for the occasional spell here and there, but it’s enough.”

“You need a license to do magic?” Ben asked, raising his eyebrows.

I nodded.

He sat forward, intrigued. “Can I see yours?”

“I… don’t have one.” I blushed, rubbing the back of my neck. “I took a couple local courses, but… things didn’t go so well. When I tried my hand at using a sending stone to deliver a message, it blasted feedback and blew out the windows in the classroom. I don’t really have a use for magic, anyways; since I’m on parole I’d have to submit paperwork for any spell I tried to cast. It’s just an inconvenience.”

…

Saturday. 12:44 PM.

“This is ridiculous,” Davis declared, crossing his arms. “Why do we need to hear about this crap?”

“It’s my alibi, for one,” I pointed out. “And it’s relevant to the story. You said you wanted me to tell you everything. This is everything.”

I wiggled my foot, trying to get the rock to shift to the side so it wouldn’t be so obnoxious. It didn’t move.

Murray frowned, looking me over. “Your alibi?”

“It’ll make sense in a minute,” I said. “But, yeah. Ben can corroborate my story and tell you where I was before I called 911.”

Glancing at her partner, Murray said, “Right. I’ll check on that. Davis, play nice.” Getting to her feet, she took her lemonade with her, walking out through the magical partition that separated our little gazebo from the rest of the park.

Oops. I hadn’t meant to make her leave. If I was going to be alone with Davis, I was going to have to be very, very careful with my wording.

He looked at me, his mouth pulled into a tight smirk as he read my expression. Sitting forward, he commented, “You can, you know.”

Either he was being obtuse on purpose, or I was deeply missing the subtext. “I can what?”

Showing his teeth, he said, “Confess without teeth. No spell needed.”

I swallowed. Being alone with him was going to be seriously dangerous.

Then again, it was also an opportunity.

…

Friday. 2:23 PM.

“So, hold on a moment,” Ben said, chin resting on his hand as he thought about it. “If they can do this ‘Communication hex’ to keep you from spilling the beans, how come you could just explain it to me now?”

It was a fair question. “It’s a matter of closeness. You and I are fairly close right now, see?” I gestured to the distance between us.

“You could say that.” He smirked, though I didn’t get the joke.

“And we’re talking to each other in person, with no steps in between. That makes it really hard to disrupt. Maybe if my case officer was in the cafe, actively keeping a spell running, he could muck things up, but that’s really not worth their time unless I’m running around with a megaphone.”

“That makes sense,” he nodded along. “So, with your article, it was easier to disrupt because it was far away.”

“More like, it was easier to disrupt because it was indirect. When we’re working with something that’s written down, especially something that gets transcribed or copied a couple times before it gets delivered to its destination, it’s easy to make anything sound like authentic gibberish. A personal letter might be harder, and a phone call would probably take some kind of active effort to—”

The penny dropped, and my spine went cold.

“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.

“I have to go.” I looked at my coffee. It was still mostly full, but there was no time to drink it. “Do you want this?”

He stood with me, looking around the cafe as though he expected to see something shocking. “I-uh, no, thank you. What’s going on?”

“I think… danger,” I said, trying to process the words to explain while a train of logic was steaming through my head. “There was a communications hex, and… I could be wrong, but—no time. I have to go.”

“Well, it was good to meet—” Ben started to say.

No time for goodbyes. “I have to go,” I repeated, slinging my backpack over my shoulder, unclipping my helmet, and running out the door. Andrea Hills was in danger, and I might already have been too late.