When her magical curse had fallen on her at age sixty-one, she had been picked up by the local police for accidentally throwing magic around. When she hadn’t been able to control it, she had been forced to leave her current beau behind when she was shipped off to her first—and only real—magic school concentration camp. But that was years ago in Alabama.
Her crime had been a simple transmutation of a murder of crows in her back yard into fire breathing dragons. Three small dragons, but the two alarm fire that had resulted when the mini-dragons set the autumn-dry leaves in the forest behind her home aflame had been costly. At a real school, she had learned to control her dragons when they were close by, but when they got free or were sold, her dragons set things on fire. There was a very limited market for that—a Las Vegas show had hired her, but when the casino burned down, she lost that gig.
And then there had been Dani, Sandra, Tridevi, and Marvin.
She kissed the air between them and batted her eyes at her sweetie. Stuff young people expected old people to do. When Marvin reappeared in her life, she’d given up her current boy-toy and some of her independence. Marvin was worth it.
She had hated magic school the first time. She had sworn she would never go back, but here she was. At least she had Marvin and her friends. All for one and one for all, and all that stuff.
“Love you too, Sweetie,” she said to Monica, and ended the call.
She handed Zeddie the phone and tapped Marvin’s hand, the one holding the mug of coffee and bourbon. The horny, bourbon drinking, blue-pill-taking Marvin, looked over at her. “You want a magic hoochie cootchie school? If you can handle another go round today, I can make your pecker stand up right now, big boy.” Mable gave a little shoulder shimmy that shook her ample bosom.
Dani coughed. Fake cough. To cover laughter. Mable’s cover was that she met Marvin the day she moved to the school and they were having a wild fling. Timing their admissions and their falsified documentation had been fun.
Mable stuck her tongue out at Dani. Just the tip. She was a lady after all.
Dani’s cover was of a gray-haired stick in the mud who liked art and fancy wine.
Sandra’s cover was exactly what she was. A former preacher full of guilt.
Mable was a fun-loving party girl, which was actually true. Even after the magic hit her, Mable still craved men and sex. She had spent time with plenty of guys, and of them all, Marvin was the best. Thanks to the pills.
Dani
Dani glanced back outside,but the truck was still parked in its usual place. Even after four weeks here, she was amused at the byplay at the table, but trying not to show it; amusement would have ruined her cover as the standoffish, snobby widow MacCharles. Mable fluttered her lashes and stroked Marvin’s thigh, part of her cover, but also a normal action for her. Mable had had a reputation even back in the high school that she, Marvin, and Dani had attended. The brilliant blonde had been hot to trot in the nineteen seventies and she hadn’t slowed down as she neared her own seventies.
Marvin and Mable had been banging uglies—Marvin’s words—ever since he opened the door to Tridevi, walked straight up to Mable, and said, “I’ve been looking for you for forty-five years, Mable Esterline. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
Mable had said, “Marvin, are you gonna cheat on me again?”
“Darlin’, I have regretted that every year and every moment we’ve been apart. If you go out with me, I swear by all that’s holy, I’ll be faithful to you until we die. And my word is golden.”
“I warn you. I’m pretty good with martial arts now. You cheat on me again, I’ll yank off your willie and throw Mr. Wonderful to the fish.”
Then Mable had thrown her arms around his neck and locked lips. She had also taken three weeks off from Tridevi. She had been glowing ever since.
Dani and Sandra had met in the nineteen-nineties, at a luncheon put on by the city churches to encourage discourse between black and white congregations. In their case, the interfaith initiative had paid off and they had been friends ever since.
Tridevi made a good team.
Dani glanced once more out the window. It looked as if things in Building Z were winding up. The white truck was still parked back where it had started and the men who had been driving back and forth were stripping out of the hazmat suits. They tossed them in a plastic bag before heading to the parking lot.
Zeddie brought their desserts to Table J. Not ice cream, but oatmeal cream pies.Gross. Dani put hers in her purse and tapped on the table three times, the signal that they needed to meet in the hallway for a quick word. Normally they only met in the mornings, but they had to know what she had seen.
They all got up, Marvin slinging his plastic wrapped pie at the kitchen door. He was a pretty good shot. It hit mid center with a plastic-rattling thump as they stepped into the hallway.
They gathered in the hall in front of the dining room, and Marvin, who had a lot more control than The Sevens’ COO knew, said, “That dessert was fuckety fucking disgusting.” That particular use of Marvin’s favorite word was his plastic-to-dirt spell. The pickup mics all around them turned into dirt and rained from the ceiling tiles. The plastic in the vinyl tiles under their feet bubbled and turned to dirt, and, unfortunately, the elastic in Dani’s pants turned to dirt too.
Dani grabbed her pants’ waistband and glared at him.
“Fuck,” Marvin said again, and sighed as if he had made a mistake, though it was likely the icing on the cake that continued to make the staff believe in Marvin’s lack of control. “Sorry.”
Before the guards showed up, Dani quietly told them what she had seen out the window.
The moment Zeddie poked his head out the door, Sandra slapped Marvin with the magazine. “You nasty man. You stop messing with my drawers!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose! It was an accident! Stop whacking me, you religious nutcase!”
