Kiss and Spell
When their spell didn’t work, our pursuers kept up the chase. “Earl!” I warned, but he didn’t seem too worried. He merely turned back, waved his free hand, and there was a huge burst of light. He then shouted, “This way!” and pulled us into a narrow passage between buildings. We ran down a set of stairs leading to a basement door and huddled at the foot of the stairwell.
“What’s going on here?” Owen asked, looking truly alarmed.
“I’ll explain in a moment, when we’re safe,” I said.
He reached for the handle of the basement door. “Wouldn’t it be better to hide inside?”
Earl slapped his hand away. “Not now.”
I hardly dared breathe while we waited for discovery. I thought I heard footsteps. Had they followed us into the passage? Finally, Earl cautiously raised himself enough to peer out of the stairwell. When he was satisfied that the gray guys were gone, he opened the basement door and gestured for us to enter.
Earl had formed a magical light after the door closed behind us. Owen jumped back from the light, startled, then asked, “What is that? And why didn’t we open the door earlier?”
“I didn’t know how long my blast would obscure their vision. They wouldn’t see us in the stairwell from the street, but they might have noticed the door opening.”
“There was no one there,” Owen protested. Then he looked around the empty shell of the basement. “What is this place? And what’s going on?” He sounded less alarmed than most people might under the circumstances, but more alarmed than I was used to hearing from Owen.
It would have been pleasant if I could have snapped him out of it with a kiss, but that hadn’t worked on me the last time, and I doubted either of us were really in a kissing mood at the moment. I also wasn’t in the mood for trying to explain anything. “Check your pockets,” I said. I suspected that under the circumstances, he’d be more willing to believe himself than me.
“What do my pockets have to do with this?”
“Just check. Please.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded square of paper. I held my breath while he unfolded it and read it. If it didn’t work, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a lot of memories of him, but picking the one that was a surefire hit would be a challenge. As he read, he blinked, and I couldn’t tell what had happened.
Because I couldn’t bear to wait for the outcome and I couldn’t risk not restoring him, I said shakily, “On our first real date, the restaurant caught fire. Then there was the time I fell through the ice in the Central Park rink. Oh, and you had pet dragons.” That had to either jolt him back to himself or convince him I was insane.
He gave me a funny look, then his eyes focused and I could tell he was my Owen again. He swayed, and I rushed forward to catch him.
“You’re you again?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Yeah, wizard and all. What happened?”
“Something must have gone wrong with last night’s operation,” Earl said. “Maybe they sensed the illusion our spy used. It seems like they’ve gone around resetting all the prisoners.”
“We’re now fugitives. We’ve entered the lurking in basements and attics phase of the resistance movement,” I added. “I was afraid they might do something more drastic than just resetting me again if they caught me, since they thought they’d already got me once.”
“How did you avoid it?” Owen asked.
“I think it was a mix of my magic being weak and me shielding it slightly.”
“Good work! So, now what, boss?”
My legs were shaking from our desperate escape, so I sank to sit on the floor, and the two guys joined me. “I guess we’ll have to start all over again, waking people up, and we’ll need a new plan,” I said. “That will be more complicated while we’re fugitives.”
“I’m not sure we should wake everyone,” Owen said.
“I take it you’re not going to revive Mac right away?”
“I’m not going to revive anyone right away. We need to lie low.”
“I just wish we could find a way to get word back home. We don’t seem to be able to get to their portal. It’s too bad we can’t make one of our own.”
“Maybe we could,” Owen said.
“Between worlds?” Earl asked, his eyebrows rising.