"Thank you, sir," Elizabeth said. Her head was quite spinning with joy, fear, and lists. She had so much to do. In only a little while she'd be on her way to her first international assignment! What should she pack? How much could she take with her?

Ringwall's voice penetrated into the whirlwind of speculation bumping around in her mind. She looked back.

"And, Mayfield, don't let the woman out of your sight, whatever you do. As I told you, this assignment comes from Upstairs." He pointed toward the ceiling. Elizabeth nodded reverently.

"What's all that about?" asked Michael Gamble, springing out from the wall behind Ringwall's door the moment Elizabeth emerged. He was a fellow agent, nice to look at with his shock of dark hair a la Tom Cruise, but prone to popping up almost under one's nose. He trailed behind her as she hurried to her desk.

"I've got to follow an Irish singer around and see if she's being haunted by something from the unknown," Elizabeth said, yanking open her desk drawer for her purse and briefcase. She might as well tell him; he'd uncover it soon enough from office gossip as soon as she was gone.

"What, not another alleged poltergeist?" Gamble laughed derisively. Elizabeth made a face at him. "Is her boyfriend beating her up, eh? Sifting through her purse while she sleeps?"

"Need to know, Gamble!" Ringwall's voice roared from the office door.

"Yes, sir," Gamble said, disengaging without a trace of guilt, and sliding smoothly back into his desk chair. "Bugger all. Good luck, Mayfield."

"Thanks, mate," Elizabeth said. With her possessions in her arms, she bumped her way out toward the lift to wait for the car.

Gamble's attitude was similar to the others in the small branch, and to everyone else in British Intelligence. The government most fervently did not believe in magic. They felt there had to be a mundane explanation for anything that happened. Even that which was completely inexplicable was told off as having a cause that they were not yet able to ascertain, just that it wasn't and never could be magic. Well, they were wrong.

Elizabeth often wondered what Mike and the others would say if she told them that she knew poltergeists and visitations and, indeed, magic, were real. An admission like that would tag her as a genuine loony, and she'd lose the credibility she had established painstakingly over the last six years. Salaries in the public sector were by no means generous. She needed to stay on the promotable track in these budget-conscious days. So she laughed when the others laughed, and made disparaging comments about the trippers who mooned around Stonehenge and Britain's other mystic sites. All of them had their government-issue wands, bells, and censers, and an officially sanctioned grimoire full of exorcisms, invocations, and exhortations that everyone used but considered to be a huge joke. The spells didn't work for most of them. Any actual effect was put off to coincidence.

If the official word was that these things did not really exist, it was fine with her. Some day the opportunity might come along that would prove to the scoffers once and indisputably for all that magic was real. The best way to do that would be to find some real magic and bring it to her superiors' attention. But her superiors, like the rest of the world, did not really want her to find any. It was much more comfortable to keep the department going on speculation, hope and fear.

She hoped sincerely that the Irish singer was not really mutilating herself, or being attacked by another person whom she was shielding. In order to justify OOPSI's actions—and budget—Elizabeth needed to produce results of some kind, but on that point the department was torn. To uncover magic would justify their funding forever, but they were not prepared to handle the publicity attendant on proving that magic existed. It was a conundrum. Elizabeth wanted to succeed in her mission. She half-hoped she could offer up a magical result, so that there would be less scepticism around the office, opening the door so that one day she could come out of the broom closet, so to speak, as a genuine practitioner. She suspected that her q.v. in the office files included mention of her grandmother and female ancestresses stretching back to the Ice Age, but nothing official had ever been said to her about it. The others were mostly here because they were fans of speculative fiction or wanted a cushy government position that didn't require much work except to visit suspected sites and look knowing.

In the meantime, she was on her way to her very first international assignment. Though it was only logical to use a woman to protect a woman closely, giving her the job still meant that the brass believed in her ability to do the job. She was very proud.

Proud and astonished, when, instead of the usual antique, miniature Peugeot minicab, the car that pulled up to carry her to Heathrow was a long, black limousine, the kind used to convey senior officials to white tie dinners at Buckingham Palace. The driver, an older man in a peaked cap, leaped out to open the door for her. Feeling like royalty, albeit royalty in a hurry, she jumped into the back seat. As the car pulled away, Elizabeth got a glimpse of her co-workers gazing enviously down from the office windows. This piece of luck boded well for her mission.

"Just five minutes, miss, or you'll be late for the arriving flight," the driver said as he double-parked at the kerb outside of her flat. Elizabeth hopped out the door.

"I'll hurry," she said, giving the limousine door a pat as she closed it. It was so nice to be given a bit of luxury. She glanced up and down the street. No sign of the courier as yet. It would probably be some spotty youth wearing a Day-Glo tabard and mounted on a motorbike who could negotiate the traffic faster than her car. No doubt he'd be waiting when she came down.

Although she had always regretted not being able to have a cat in the apartment, this time she was grateful. Now she had no need to call a friend or relative to come and feed it, unable to explain how long she'd be gone. At last, Elizabeth experienced the excitement she'd always pictured when she first joined the service. She was the agent in charge of a high profile international case! She was still quite breathless over the suddenness of it all.

Elizabeth ran upstairs, mentally sorting out her wardrobe. She had no idea what kind of clothing she'd need in New Orleans, a place whose name she recognized, but had no actual knowledge of. She had a vague idea that it was hot there. That would be a welcome change from the chilly London spring where it had yet to rise above 15 degrees Celsius.

She sorted through the built-in closets in her tiny, well-lit bedroom. Very little of her everyday wardrobe was suitable for high temperatures, and she didn't think that the colorful bandanna skirts and halter tops she wore on Costa del Sol holidays would be appropriate for an MI-5 field agent on the job. Still, on a high-profile assignment like this she could surely cadge a clothing allowance out of the accounting department, the better to fit in with the locals. In the end, she stuffed her suitcase full of clean knickers and all the protective spell impedimenta that would fit. Always pack your own underwear, Elizabeth told herself virtuously. She stripped off her dress, and put on her most wrinkle-resistant suit, a very upper-class skirt and blazer of a cream-colored fabric that looked like linen but wore like iron. That was the way she must appear to those she encountered: neat and approachable, but inwardly tough. There, she thought, pleased at her reflection. Ready for anything.

With a last backward look at the photograph of her grandmother, who'd taught her everything she knew about the unseen world, she locked up her flat.