I wondered what Jeff’s type would be. Dealing with the situation that way was far preferable to confessing my predicament to Owen. Whether or not he had any interest in me, I still had at least a minor crush on him, and the last thing any girl wants to do is talk about her dating woes to a man she’s attracted to, especially when her dating woes are so weird.
I drained the last of my tea and said, “I’d better get home soon. My roommates will be dying to get the postdate debriefing.”
He took my mug and carried it into the kitchen, then came back to the living room and helped me to my feet. “You okay now?”
“The shakes are pretty much gone. Thanks.” I slipped my shoes back on and tested my balance in the high heels.
“Then I’ll walk you home. You’ll be safe there. The place is warded pretty well. Owen took care of that a while ago.”
“Warded?”
“No one can magically attack you in your apartment.”
“But no one can attack me magically at all.”
“They can’t attack you directly with a spell, but they can use magic to get access to you so they can attack you physically. That’s what happened tonight. Your attacker transported himself magically to get to you so you wouldn’t hear him approaching.”
“But I did hear something.”
“That was me.”
“Why didn’t you say something? You scared me to death.”
“Sorry about that. Anyway, your building is secured so no one can use magic to damage it, open locks, or anything else like that. Someone can still get in using purely physical means, but if your locks are good enough to protect you from the usual criminal elements, you should be okay.”
“That’s nice to know.”
We walked to my building in silence. I was too busy thinking of the story I would tell my roommates to make conversation. At my building, he waited for me to unlock the front door, then said, “Have a good weekend. And don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye out for you.”
“Thanks for the help, and the tea. I’ll have to thank Ari later for the lifesaving.”
And now I had to make the transition from the magical to the mundane. The big news from my evening wasn’t the date, but as usual, I couldn’t talk about the really interesting stuff.
Gemma and Marcia mobbed me as soon as I got home. Then I noticed that Connie was there, too. “That was a nice long dinner,” Gemma said. “Things must have gone well.”
I fought to hold back tears as I collapsed on the sofa.
“I don’t think things went well,” Connie said softly. She sat next to me and took my hand. “What happened?”
Gemma perched next to me on the sofa’s arm. “Didn’t you like him? I thought he was perfect.” She sounded hurt.
“He was perfect. I liked him. I just don’t think he liked me.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“He left skid marks getting away from me.”
“But that was a pretty long date if he didn’t like you,” Marcia said.
“I ran into a friend from work on my way home, and we talked awhile,” I said.
All their faces fell. “You at least got dessert, right?” Connie asked.
“He said no thanks to the dessert tray before I had a chance to say anything.”
“Then it sounds like you’re better off without him,” Connie declared. “Any man who would deny you dessert isn’t worth having.” Connie has a rather strong sweet tooth, so skipping dessert deserves the death penalty in her book. She’s the one who taught me to carry chocolate in my purse.
“Was it the sister thing again?” Gemma asked.
I couldn’t lie—she was likely to hear Keith’s side of the story. “No. It was just some weirdness that happened, and I think it scared him away.” I didn’t want to delve into the weirdness, and I hoped Keith was gentleman enough not to give details.
They all laughed. “If he thinks you’re too weird, then he’s never going to find anyone,” Marcia declared. “You’ve got to be the most ordinary person in the world.”
“Maybe I’m so ordinary, I’m weird.” That was certainly the truth. I wouldn’t have been in this weird mess if I hadn’t been so ordinary. Little did they know, but my ordinary days were well and truly over.
Monday morning, I stepped out the front door to find Owen standing on the sidewalk. Owen was physically incapable of looking casual, so I suspected he was waiting for me. “You look better than you did the last time I saw you,” I remarked as he fell into step beside me.
“You’re the one we’ve been worried about.”
“Me? I’m fine. Not a scratch.” And I was fine, more or less. Only one teensy nightmare about being grabbed in the darkness. I wouldn’t be walking home alone from anything after dark for the foreseeable future, but other than that I was A-okay. “But why didn’t y’all tell me I might be in danger?”
“We didn’t want to scare you.” The sheepish look on his face showed that he knew just how stupid that sounded. “It didn’t work so well.”
“I’m alive to tell the tale, which is the most important thing.”
I made a point of keeping my eyes peeled as we walked to the subway station, remembering what Rod had said about what I could do to help Owen.
“Other than being attacked, how was your weekend?”
“Not so bad. And yours?”
“I got some work done.” That didn’t tell me much, but now I knew from Rod that he liked opera in addition to baseball. He was unfolding like a flower.
The train arrived, and we shoved our way on board. It was particularly crowded this morning. Even standing room was hard to come by. Owen wasn’t tall, but he was taller than I was, so he was able to grab an overhead handhold. Then he circled my waist with his arm and held me steady. I could think of worse ways to commute.
This morning we had to part ways at the doorway to R&D, then I went to the tower for my first day on the job as Merlin’s assistant. “He wants to see you when you get a chance,” Trix said as I topped the escalator.
“I’ll be there in a sec.” I checked my e-mail and sent a quick response to Rod’s note asking how I was, then got a notepad and headed across the reception area to Merlin’s office. Before I could knock on the door, he opened it.
“Katie, good morning, please come in.” He ushered me in and shut the door behind me. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the sofa. “I’m sorry to hear about your weekend adventure. You aren’t suffering any lingering ill effects, I hope?”
I took a seat, and he joined me on the sofa. “Not really,” I said. “I’m fine. Just mad.”
“As are we all.”
“I guess we could take it as a sign that this Idris guy is nervous, if he’s desperate enough to try to take me out.”
“He does seem to perceive our activities as a threat. I imagine he connected the timing of your arrival here with our increased efforts against him and wanted to find out what, exactly, your role was.”
“He’d have been disappointed.”
“I strongly doubt that. I understand you declined Mr. Gwaltney’s offer of finding less hazardous employment.”
“They just got me riled up. He’d better look out now.”
He laughed. “That’s the way I thought you’d respond. Now, I suppose I should let you know what I expect of you in your new position.”
We spent the next half hour going over my duties, which seemed to be pretty much the same kinds of things I’d done in my last job, except with a far nicer boss. I was to read over every document he was given, only to look for hidden spells and illusions rather than for typos and grammatical errors. When necessary, I’d sit in on meetings along with Trix and compare notes with her to see if there was anything going on that shouldn’t be. And I’d continue to head the marketing efforts. It sounded like I should stay pretty busy, which was okay by me.
“And don’t hesitate to speak up if you have any ideas,” he added. “I’m an old man who’s been out of the worl
d for far too long, and we need your fresh perspective.”
I couldn’t begin to express how good it was to have a boss who treated me like a human being with half a brain. In that long year working for Mimi, I’d started to let myself think I didn’t know enough to be of use. “I’ll try,” I said. “I hope I don’t let you down.”
“You won’t.” Once again he had that eerie certainty about him that gave me a chill. One day, I thought, I’d get the nerve to ask him about it.
Late that afternoon, Trix tapped on my door. “There’s an emergency meeting. He wants you in there.”
I grabbed my pen and notepad, wondering what was going on. Would this be my first big meeting as Merlin’s personal verifier?
When I saw who was gathered for the meeting, I doubted it. It was the same group as on Friday, minus Gregor and the accounting gnome. Owen looked grim and distracted, and he gave me only the slightest of nods as I entered. There was an aura of gloom and doom that hung over the room. I took my seat at the table silently.
Merlin kicked things off. “Owen, why don’t you tell us what you’ve discovered today?”
“Idris has a new spell on the market, and it’s quite dark. We’re back to square one.”
“What is the new spell?” Mr. Hartwell asked.
“It’s basically the spell he was working on when we dismissed him. It seems he finally got it ready to sell.”
“This could be a sign of panic on his part,” I pointed out, “if the poor quality and whatever we were doing had an impact. He needed to get something on the market that he knew would work while he hurried to fix the other spell.”
“That doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem,” Owen said with a deep sigh. “This one works, and we don’t have a way to counter it. It’s good—no big energy drain, it’s effective, it’s everything he promises it to be. It’s still all about influence, but not quite in the puppetmaster way the other spell was—he was reaching too far with that one. This one just makes the victim incredibly open to suggestion. The victim still has some degree of free will, but he is strongly drawn to wanting to please the caster. In the wrong hands, it could be devastating. The victim won’t ever realize anything’s wrong, unlike with that other spell.”
“And if it works as advertised, it means none of our marketing messages are going to be very effective,” I said. “We can no longer stand on the position that our spells work and have been thoroughly tested.” I think I was more upset about this development than I had been about being attacked. It made weeks of work practically useless.
They all turned to me, and I wished I hadn’t spoken. “Katie, do you have any ideas?” Merlin asked.
I shook my head. “Sorry, but I can’t think of anything right now. It seems like our real differentiator is that our spells can’t be used to do harm. The people who don’t want to do harm or use other people won’t be interested anyway, and nothing we say will influence the people who do want to use others. ‘Just say no’ wasn’t very effective for Nancy Reagan, and I doubt it will help us much.”
I was sure I saw disappointment in Merlin’s eyes, and I felt bad for letting him down. I’d let myself get a big head from my earlier successes and had managed to forget that I was a small-town girl with a business degree and a year working as a marketing assistant. “I’m sorry,” I said after a while. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Please do,” Merlin said, and I fought to blink back tears. I turned away from Merlin to see Owen looking at me with compassion in his eyes. I realized he was in pretty much the same boat I was, where all his previous successes meant next to nothing now.
“How long until you have an effective counterspell that will render this one meaningless?” Merlin asked him.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure we ever will. As I said, this was the spell he was working on when he left, and we’ve been looking for ways to counter it ever since then, yet we still haven’t come up with anything. I’ve been over all of his source material. I’ve taken that spell apart and looked at it inside out and upside down. I’m afraid it’s airtight.”
“No spell is perfect. You can find a weakness.” This was a whole new side to Merlin that I hadn’t seen before. Until now, although I knew intellectually that this was the Merlin, it hadn’t really sunk in that this was the man who had put Arthur on the throne, who had been instrumental in all those great deeds they still told stories about. I could see that legend in the man who sat at the head of the table now, and it was rather intimidating.
Owen flinched, a flush spreading upward from his collar, and he nodded. “I’ll keep at it.”
“Minerva?”
She shrugged. “Still nothing. I’m not getting any portents, one way or another, which means the situation is still in flux. We can influence the outcome.”
“We’ll get the sales force out on the streets, with verifiers to see where and how this stuff is selling,” Mr. Hartwell said. “I can even call in some old debts and get customer names, so we know who to track.” He must not have wanted Merlin coming down on him, so he was being proactive with the information.
“Good,” Merlin said curtly. “If he succeeds here, then we know he’ll continue trying. We can not allow this to succeed. We had these problems in my time, and it nearly tore Britain apart. I’ve read enough of the history I’ve missed to know the same thing has happened here, and fairly recently.” That caught my attention. Had there been other magical wars the rest of the world didn’t know about? Then maybe this situation wasn’t as dire as I’d feared, since we’d all clearly survived. I made a mental note to go back to reading those books Owen had loaned me.
“But this is the first challenge we’ve faced that’s come in business form,” Merlin continued. “That gives it the slightest aura of legitimacy, which makes it appealing to those who might be wavering between light and dark. Few of those would sign up for the side of evil in a magical war, but give them a legitimate-looking product, and they’ll be tempted. Corrupt them a little bit, and it’s easy to corrupt them further. We must stop this now.” I felt a surge of magical charge at his words and shivered. Okay, so maybe the situation was as dire as I feared.
I racked my brain for a way I could help, but I was getting nothing. I couldn’t see a “Don’t do bad magic” campaign going over too well. But what else could we do if we couldn’t imply that the competition had shoddy spells? As I’d said, the people who’d be into this sort of thing already knew this was bad and didn’t care.
I rewound the meeting to that point in my brain, searching for anything I might be able to use. Something Owen had said triggered a vague memory of something recent that hadn’t been important or meaningful enough to think about at the time. But now it just might do the trick.
I was almost afraid to bring it up. What if they’d already considered, and then rejected, this idea long ago? Or worse, what if they’d considered and tried it, and it hadn’t worked? It was so obvious, but I’d learned that what was obvious to me wasn’t always obvious to people who for all intents and purposes lived in an entirely different world.
Oh hell, it was worth a shot. I cleared my throat. “I might have an idea.”
Every head in the room turned to stare at me, and for a second I thought I should have kept my mouth shut. “You may have already thought of this, but I haven’t heard anyone bring it up yet.” I licked my lips and wished I had a glass of water handy for wetting my suddenly dry throat. “My world has its own powers, you know. And like magic, some of them can be used for good or for evil. For example, lawyers.”
I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn’t going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. “What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?” Mr. Hartwell asked.
“Lawyers can stop just about anything. Tie it up in court, and nobody gets anywhere for ages. That could buy you the time you need to come up with a better way of fighting this. I’m no expert, but you might have an intellectual property case.”<
br />
“What’s that?” Owen asked. The flicker of hope in his eyes gave me the courage to keep going.
“Anything an employee develops while working here belongs to the company, not to the employee. Surely you have some language to that effect in employment agreements.”
Owen nodded. “Especially in R and D.”
“The point of that is to keep an employee from developing something on company time, using company resources, then selling it himself. And that seems to be what Idris is doing. He’s taking something he developed here and using it to create his own products. You might be able to make him stop that.”
“How do we do that?” Merlin asked.
“I’m not sure, but I may know someone who would know. I’ll have to check. It could take a couple of days.” I was going out on a limb here, basing my grand idea for saving the world on a blind date my roommate had once had, but this situation sounded exactly like the one he’d described in his dinner table conversation.
“Please do check, then report as soon as possible.”
The meeting broke up, and we all went back to our respective offices with our individual tasks. I’d felt exhilarated before, when my proposal for a marketing plan had been accepted, but now I was scared. What if it didn’t work? These were awfully big stakes to hinge on something so vague.
I decided to wait until I got home to talk to Marcia. The three of us sat around the dinner table that night, still talking about the results of my Friday night date. “I don’t know what you did to him, Katie, but he wouldn’t even look at me today,” Gemma said with a laugh.
“Oh, he’s just worried she’ll be hurt if she hears he doesn’t want to call her again,” Marcia said.
“Sorry that one didn’t work out for you, hon. We’ll have to try again,” Gemma said, reaching over to pat me on the shoulder. “Maybe Philip has a friend.”
Philip’s friends were probably starting to hibernate—or whatever it is frogs do—for the winter. Or else they were all in retirement homes, if they dated from his prefrog days. “Actually, I may have an idea,” I said, figuring this was as good an opening as I was likely to get. “Marce, you aren’t going to call that Ethan guy you were matched up with a while back, are you?”
Enchanted, Inc. Page 24
