Triumph of Chaos (Red Magic) (22 page)

The clerk at the front desk had bags under her eyes, and she barely looked up when I entered the embassy.

“Excuse me,” I said, throwing as much glamour into my words as possible. “I’ve got a problem.”

She sighed. “What do you need?”

“I’ve lost my passport and all my money. I think I was robbed out on the street during the earthquake.” As I spoke, I looked around the room. Nothing seemed out of place here; maybe they hadn’t felt the aftershock? I hoped the woman wouldn’t question the one part of my story that was true.

She slid a large form across the desk. “Fill this out and we’ll see what we can do. Do you have any form of ID?”

I shook my head. Since my purse was missing, I was out of options. With a burst of magic, I leaned forward, smiling sweetly. “You really don’t need me to fill out that form, right?”

She blinked a couple of times but didn’t say anything. I tried again.

“It would be so easy to arrange things here. There’s got to be a plane leaving this afternoon, right?”

Instead of answering, she shook her head as if she had a bee buzzing in her hair. She slid off her stool and headed for an office in the back. “Let me get my supervisor. He can help you.”

Shit
. I debated turning around and running while she was gone, but the place probably had closed-circuit cameras.
I’m here now, so I guess I should try to see this thing through.

A man in a dark blue suit came toward me, and I felt a momentary surge of panic. He was easily six feet tall and built like a linebacker, and he didn’t look like he’d be easy to manipulate.
What kind of special-operative training does the government give its employees?
I swallowed nervously.

“May I help you?” The fluorescent lights overhead glinted off his bald scalp, and I forced myself to smile.

“Like I said, I got robbed in the quake. I don’t have my passport or my money.” I laughed ruefully. “I was headed to the airport, and in all the commotion, my suitcase disappeared. This is all I have left.” I gestured down at my torn, dirty clothes.

He frowned. “Why was your money in your suitcase?”

I looked him straight in the eye. “My mom is paranoid. She told me to never travel with my money in an obvious spot, since a purse is more likely to get snatched than something else.” I forced a short laugh. “I guess I proved to be the exception.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I’d like to help you, Miss—?”

“Smith,” I answered quickly. I didn’t want to use my real name if I could help it.

“Miss Smith,” he continued, his face devoid of expression, “but I need some kind of proof that you are an American citizen.”

“How could I be anything but?”

He didn’t seem to be reacting to my glamour.
This might be a problem
. “Plenty of very convincing young ladies claim to be American citizens, but you’d be surprised how few tourists actually end up in the situation you are describing.”

My stomach fell. “Really?”

“Really. Most tourists are more careful with their belongings, and,” he added meaningfully, “they certainly don’t put all their money in their suitcase.”

My mind raced, searching for a plausible lie. “Like I said, my mom is paranoid.”

“Are you traveling with your mother?”

“No. I’m on my own.”

“A little young for that, aren’t you?”

“I’m eighteen.” The lie felt real, and I realized that in a few months, I
would
turn eighteen. “I’m old enough to travel by myself.”

“Were you in a cab when the quake happened?”

I shook my head. “No, I told you, I was walking on the street.”

“Why would you be walking to the airport?” His questions were coming more rapidly and I was struggling to keep up.

“There weren’t any cabs at my hotel, so I was walking ‘til I found one.”

“Which hotel were you staying at?”

I looked at him. “I don’t remember the name, but it had a blue door.”

“A blue door. Miss Smith, you could be describing just about any building in Athens.”

“I can show you where it is. It’s right near the Parthenon.”

“That won’t be necessary.” He flicked his right wrist in a subtle gesture, and two men in brown security uniforms stepped forward. I’d been so focused on the official that I hadn’t even noticed them, and I took an involuntary step back.

“I just want to get home.” My voice rose, and I struggled to control the fear that was rushing through me.

He nodded. “We’ll make sure you get home. If you’d please accompany these two gentlemen.”

Nervously, I shook my head. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

He gave me an inscrutable look. “Who said that you had? Please step this way, Miss Smith.”

The guards closed around me, and it took all my self-control not to fling a fireball at them and take off running. “Where are we going?”

The shorter guard spoke in a clipped voice. “Somewhere you can answer a few questions.”

“To help us help you,” the other guard added in a friendly voice.

Shorty reached for my arm, but he must have seen something dangerous in my eyes, because he let his hand drop to his side without touching me. I fell in step behind the guards, nervously scanning the room. Was there any way I wasn’t already on camera? If they didn’t have security footage of me, maybe I could use Marcus’s traveling trick and pop myself out of there. I hadn’t tried it before, but he and Izzy had made it look easy. How hard could it be? The ceiling looked devoid of any surveillance equipment, but then I spotted a tiny red dot obscured by a fake plant in the corner. With a sigh, I followed the men out of the room.

They led me to a cubicle in the back of the embassy. I breathed a little easier when I realized that it wasn’t a sealed cement torture chamber. The walls didn’t reach the ceiling, so if I screamed, people would hear me.
Why would I scream? This is the American embassy.
Frantically, I tried to reign in my thoughts, but I was scared.

After the guards left, the man in the blue suit popped his head over the cubicle wall. “By the way, Miss Smith, I do hope you found time to visit the museum on the Acropolis. It’s one sight that isn’t to be missed.”

He left before I could say anything, but that didn’t matter. I was screwed, and I knew it.

Someone must have caught me on camera at the museum this morning.
I slammed my hand into the desk in front of me, and I was surprised that my fist left a small divot in the surface. If anyone heard the sound, no one responded.

I cradled my hand in my lap, my mind working furiously for a solution. I was practically a terror suspect, and I didn’t want to stick around to find out how I’d be treated when they realized I was lying. Gritting my teeth, I used a small burst of magic to heal my foot, but my hand still throbbed. Cautiously, I stood up and poked my head over the top of the cubicle. A wall separated me from the reception area, and I couldn’t see any other exit.
There has to be another door
. I was sure that people who worked overseas would want some kind of emergency exit in case the embassy was ever attacked.

The hallway appeared deserted, so I ventured out of the cubicle. If anyone stopped me, I planned to say that I was looking for the restroom. That seemed like a plausible excuse. As I made my way down the corridor, my confidence grew. They hadn’t arrested me or even locked me in a room, so clearly they didn’t think I was a real threat.

I rounded a corner and saw the familiar red glow of an Exit sign a few feet ahead, and I sighed in relief. Soon I’d be out of there, and I’d figure out another way to get home. After the fiasco at the museum, I didn’t want to stick around Greece any longer.
I’ll just have to contact Hecate from the States.
I had almost reached the door when a hand shot out from an office near the end of the hall. I didn’t even have time to process what was happening before I was being pulled into a pitch-black room. The door swung shut behind me, and I stood frozen in the dark.

“Shhh. Don’t scream. I can’t turn on a light; they monitor the power grid.”

The voice was male, but the tone didn’t sound threatening. In fact, he almost sounded helpful.

I swallowed nervously, my palms pulsing with magic. “What do you want?”

He chuckled, and I pressed my back against the door. “To help you. I’m a Witch, too.”

Speechless, I stared into the dark. The sound of a match being struck filled the space, and his glowing head emerged. The man who claimed he wanted to help me was older than my parents. His gray goatee made him look like a retired beatnik, and his eyes were magnified behind large glasses. There was nothing about him to mark him as a Witch, and for a moment, I wished frantically that Izzy were here to look at his aura.

“What kind of magic do you practice?” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice but failed.

He grinned broadly. “A little bit of fortune magic and a lot of kitchen magic. Just everyday things.”

I’d never heard magic described in that way before. “I mean, what’s your color?”

He stared at me blankly. “I’m white, like you, although I don’t see how that matters.”

I shook my head, exasperated. “Not your race. Your color! Your magical path.”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Every Witch knows what path they follow!”

He shrugged. “I taught myself how to do simple spells. No one’s ever mentioned colors or paths before.”

I stared at him in surprise. A part of me wanted to trust him, but it just seemed too weird to meet someone who claimed to be a Witch who didn’t know anything about the paths of magic. “Show me something.”

The match went out in a gust of wind, and I laughed nervously. “That’s not magic.”

“That’s not what I was showing you.” A faint blue light filled the room, like an emergency flashlight. The man was holding the glow in his hands. It flickered out quickly, but I was convinced.

“So you’re a Blue Witch?”

He lit another match. “I don’t know about that. But like I said, I want to help you.”

“How did you even know what I am?”

He laughed softly. “I can sort of sense magic, and girl, you’re like a flashing neon sign.”

His words irked me, but I thought about what he’d said. “I’ve never really tried to sense another person’s magic before. What’s it like?”

“You know the feeling you get when you’re doing magic?”

I nodded. For me, it was an electric tingling, coupled with heat flowing through my body.

“It’s like that, only more faint. I can tell when other people are doing magic around me because my skin starts to prickle, like when I do magic only with the volume way down.” He struck another match, and shadows danced around the room.

“I’ve never tried to figure out if someone was doing magic.”

“Then how do you know who you can talk to about it?”

“Everyone I know is a Witch, so the topic isn’t exactly off-limits.”

“Wow.” He was silent for a minute, thinking. “My partner is the only other person who knows magic, and that’s only because I taught him.”

Gods, he must feel so alone!
Were there other people like him, other Dreamers who had managed to learn a little magic without the help of a school like Trinity? “There are a lot more of us out there, I promise you.”