A Kind of Magic by Shanna Swendson Page B

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    Sophie thought for a moment that Josephine was going to explode. Blotches of red formed on her cheeks, and her nostrils flared. Her chest rose and fell rapidly for several breaths, and when she spoke, she did so through clenched teeth. “Keep your heads in the sand if you wish, but I will carry out my duties. Our mandate is to keep the fae from influencing our world. We’ve grown complacent in centuries with nothing to do but monitor a few nature spirits and keep an eye on known passages to the Borderlands. Now is the time for us to rise up and be the enchantresses we were born to be.”
    “I didn’t realize I’d ever stopped,” Amelia said dryly before standing and saying, “Dessert and coffee in the living room?”
    Josephine barely waited for them to be resettled and served before she picked up where she’d left off. “If you need help dealing with the situation, I can offer the assistance of my circle.”
    “So far, it seems that most of the activity we’ve seen is relatively benign,” Amelia said.
    “Do you consider the missing children to be ‘benign’?”
    Sophie had just been throwing out ideas earlier when she’d suggested to Michael that someone was trying to make the enchantresses seem more important, but hearing Josephine’s attempt to rally them made it seem like a much more credible theory. Was Josephine the one trying to frame the fae? On an impulse, Sophie said, “That’s not fae.”
    The enchantress’s reaction was strong enough to be satisfying. She froze for a split second, then her lips tightened. “How do you know?”
    “I’ve looked at a map. The fae actually have a fairly hard time in this city. Too much iron. They’re active in the major parks where there’s plenty of green space, but they generally avoid midtown, and especially the high-rises made of steel.”
    “How do you explain children missing from rooms whose windows don’t open, in apartments locked from the inside?”
    “It’s definitely magic, but they weren’t taken by the fae. I’d hazard a guess that it was done by someone who wanted to make the fae look bad, but who had no experience with an actual fairy abduction—or assumed that no one else did.”
    Josephine’s reaction was more than Sophie could have hoped for. She turned stark white—livid—and went so still that she seemed to even have stopped breathing for a moment. But it only lasted a moment. A heartbeat or two later, she gave Sophie an icy smile and said, “Oh, so you’re an expert on the fae now, are you? I thought you only just learned you were an enchantress.”
    The reaction was all Sophie needed. She’d wondered who’d want to frame the fae, and now she had a feeling she knew. All of this had to be part of some kind of power game. But she couldn’t let on this early. Instead, she kept her eyes as wide and innocent as she could manage and said, “Oh, I don’t know much about being an enchantress, but my grandmother taught me all about the fae. We lived near the woods, so we had them around when I was growing up. They even tried to take my sister once. So while I wasn’t formally an enchantress, I suppose I was doing the same sort of work.”
    Amelia gave Sophie a sidelong glance, but if she was confused about Sophie’s line of conversation, that was the only sign. She jumped right in, picking up the thread. “That’s how we met Sophie and realized what she was. She was doing it all naturally.”
    “Yes,” Athena agreed. “She’s new to being called an enchantress, but she was doing the work all along, and she knows more about the fae than anyone I’ve met.”
    “I just don’t know who’d want to take children from their families,” Sophie said, hoping she wasn’t pouring it on too thick. “We know why the fae take them, but what other magic users out there would have a reason? Trolls and ogres are something out of fairy tales, right? They’re not really real.”
    “There are trolls under some of the