By

Brian W. Antoine

Oct 23, 1993

I was a beautiful day, even for this time of August. I was escorting Janet around while she did her birthday shopping. For her present this year, I'd taken her downtown and told her to "shop until the cards melt". It wasn't one of my smarter moves, since she was already married and it wasn't to me. At the time, I didn't really care. The two of us were having fun, and that's all that counted in my mind.

We had just come out of the Bon. Janet with a couple of bags of stuff and me with my arms loaded. I was trying to see in front of me, when for the second time in my life, something happened that would change it forever. We were headed back to the Parkade to drop a load of packages in my 300ZX, when I heard a scream behind me. All I saw was Janet as she raised her head to look up at something above us. From then on, I was running on training.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something falling towards us. Without even thinking about the consequences, I shielded Janet and cast a spell to stop whatever it was I had seen falling. The next scream was Janet's.

When I finally dropped the boxes I'd been holding and could look up. I found myself staring at some clown who had decided to commit suicide by jumping from the top of the Parkade. Janet and I had had the abysmal luck to be walking under him as he jumped. I can just imagine what it looked like to the people who were gathering to watch while Janet screamed herself hoarse.

She was surrounded by a pale blue bubble, the shield I'd envoked to protect her. The jumper was suspended at about the third floor by a brilliant beam of energy that originated where I was standing. I was just standing there trying to think of something brilliant to say as the crowd gathered.

"Shit, I think I'm screwed." I turned and began to let the jumper descend towards the ground. His eye's followed my every move as he came closer, as did the eye's of the small mob that had gathered. The moment he was on the ground, he took off running. "Ok, don't thank me..."

Janet had finally stopped screaming, but was trying to back away from me. The shield wasn't giving an inch. "Are you ok?" She nodded, but didn't say a thing. I looked at the crowd and then back at her. "I guess I can't blame you. Now you know why I always play a Magic User. It helps to stick with what you're best at." I dropped the shield that was holding her. Before it even finished dropping, she was gone. That was the last I ever saw or heard from her except for a phone call from her husband telling me he'd just bought a gun.

If it had been anyplace less public, I may have been able to cover it up. As it was, I was screwed royal. I'd had it drilled into me from the day Kimi had first shown up on my doorstep. You never, ever, revealed the fact that magic was real to the world. Anyone who tried, lost their abilities almost instantly to prevent them from proving it. I looked around at the crowd that had gathered. "I don't suppose you'd believe it was a trick?"

I got my answer almost immediately. Of all the people who had to have seen what happened, I’d had the miserable luck to have pick an intersection that had been staked out by a corner preacher that day. I knew I was in trouble when I heard him mutter, "Witch".

"Oh shit..." As I stood there, I heard the tone of the crowd change. I don't know where they found it, but someone found a piece of concrete and tried to bounce it off of my head. Still running on automatic, I shielded as I saw it flying through the air. I was more surprised that the spell still worked, then of the way the crowd reacted. Given everything I'd learned, I should have been powerless at that point.

"Ok, since that worked, it's time to exit stage right." I levitated myself and the shield straight up until I could no longer see the crowd below. It was nice and peaceful at ten thousand feet, so I stopped and tried to figure out what to do next. The only thing I could think of was to grab what I could and leave the area. With any kind of luck, the crowd would not be able to agree on my description. There had been more than fifty people watching my little magic show. That should have meant at least thirty different descriptions.

It might even have worked. If there hadn't been someone who had just walked out of Huppins with a brand new, and unfortunately fully charged, camcorder. By the next morning, my picture was on the front page of every local newspaper. By the end of the week, the story of what had happened had made it all over the planet.