Damsel Under Stress

by Shanna Swendson

  It was only then that I remembered the meeting we had to discuss Idris’s latest scheme. “Oh no! I’m sorry, I guess I got sidetracked.” I thought for a moment about telling Owen about Ethelinda, but now that she’d given up on us and would probably be out of our hair, I figured he didn’t need one more thing to worry about.

  “It’s okay, I think I know all that you know at this point, so I was able to fill everyone in. You’ll just have to cover for me at the next meeting.” He frowned as he looked at me, then asked, “Is something wrong?”

  I had to fight the urge to laugh maniacally. Seriously, what wasn’t wrong? Our enemy was apparently thriving, and there was nothing we seemed able to do about it. I had an incompetent fairy godmother who was interfering in my life and who had just declared that I wasn’t suited for the man of my dreams, after all. Meanwhile, I had to admit that things with Owen did seem to have stalled out on the romantic front, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was because circumstances kept getting in the way of us having a normal dating life and how much might be because we really weren’t cut out to be anything more than friends. But I knew that wasn’t what he meant. “No, nothing’s wrong. Just frustrating lines and unhelpful people. I’m sorry I took it out on you.”

  “That’s okay. We all have bad days.” He reached as though to touch the side of my face and came back with a foil-wrapped piece of chocolate. “Maybe this will help.”

  As I unwrapped it, I said, “I hope you just conjured this because I’m not sure I want to eat chocolate that’s been hiding up your sleeve or behind my ear.” He gave me a vague, mysterious look, but I needed chocolate in the worst way, so I popped it into my mouth. “Anything interesting come out of the meeting?” I asked once the chocolate had made its way into my system and calmed me somewhat.

  He rearranged a few of the piles on one of the lab tables. “Nothing much. We rehashed the same old theories. I did share your theory about boiling a frog—but with a metaphor slightly less frightening to Mr. Lansing—and what we noticed last night about Idris and Sylvia Meredith. Ethan’s still working on Philip’s claim against that company, but it’s hard to prove a century-old enchantment.” He shuffled, then straightened another pile. “Oh, and Mr. Mervyn wants you to try that other experiment.”

  “What other experiment?”

  “The one to take away your immunity temporarily so you can see what the rest of the world sees. He thinks that could be helpful.”

  “Oh yeah, that.” I knew I shouldn’t be nervous about this, since I trusted Owen to do the potion the right way and I’d survived the last time when Idris and his people had tampered with the water supply going into my building. It had been my idea in the first place, but now that it looked like a reality, it was scarier than I’d anticipated.

  Owen moved over to another lab table, where a beaker and a few vials sat. As he mixed things up, he said, “You probably won’t see any effects until the second dose, which I’ll give you in the morning. This is more concentrated than the formulation you were given before, so I expect it will hit you more suddenly. You’ll know for sure it’s happening.”

  “And then how long will it last?”

  “That depends on how well it works and if we get what we want rather quickly. If we stop at three doses, which is what I think we’ll need for maximum effect, it should have completely worn off after New Year’s.”

  His mention of New Year’s reminded me of the message Rod gave me back before I ran out to confront Ethelinda. “Oh, yeah, have you called Rod back yet? I ran into him and he said to remind you he’s having a big New Year’s Eve party and he wanted us there. He says it’s a costume party, so he wants me to invite my friends. They’ll never know who’s magical and who’s in costume.”

  He scowled as he stirred his potion in the beaker. “Costumes? Where are we going to come up with costumes at this time of year?”

  “You could always go as a wizard.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Oh, come on, you’d look great in one of those flowing robes and a pointy hat with stars and moons on it. Maybe a white beard.”

  “Or Mickey Mouse ears,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What flavor do you want this to be?”

  “What?”

  “The potion. I can flavor it to taste. Chocolate?”

  I eyed the fizzing potion suspiciously. “I don’t think that looks like the right texture for chocolate. Can you make it taste like tea?”

  “Tea I can do.” He waved his hand over the beaker, whispering a few words, then handed it to me. “Here you go. Bottoms up.”

  I took a cautious sip. It really did taste like sweetened iced tea, so I drank the rest. He watched me the whole time, like he thought I might suddenly sprout rabbit ears. I was tempted to shake violently or fake a faint just to see how he’d react, but I suspected he wouldn’t take well to that. He looked tense enough as it was. I knew he wasn’t crazy about this plan and was only doing it under Merlin’s orders. “Not bad,” I said when I’d emptied the beaker.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine. Am I supposed to feel something?”

  He shook his head and brushed his hair off his forehead. “No, I guess I’m just worried. I can’t help it. If they’ve been coming after us, I’m concerned about what might happen while you’re affected.”

  “How will they know? I managed to fake you out the last time. They shouldn’t know I’ve lost my immunity.” Again, I wondered if telling him about Ethelinda might make him feel better, but then decided it might make him even more paranoid. “So, about that party,” I said, changing the subject.

  “Do you want to go?”

  “It might be fun. If your estimate is right, I should still be slightly affected by the immunity loss, so I would see some of what my friends are seeing, which might help avoid any real weirdness.”

  “I should warn you, Rod’s parties are rather notorious. They usually get a little wild for my taste, but it is certainly something you should experience at least once.”

  I wondered for a second if he’d made other plans for us. A quiet evening at home with the two of us sounded more like his idea of a celebration, but I did also want to be with my friends. This party would be the best of both worlds—ringing in the New Year with him and with my friends. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go,” I said. “I haven’t ever been to a big New Year’s Eve party. I promise to keep my roommates from bothering you.”

  He smiled and nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll go.” He didn’t sound too disappointed, so if he had thought about what he’d rather be doing, he didn’t seem like he’d planned in detail. If I knew Owen, he might even have forgotten that New Year’s tended to follow Christmas, he was so caught up in his work. “And if you like, we could have dinner tonight and talk about costumes. Maybe it’ll be our lucky night, and we can have a normal dinner.”

  As much as I liked him, I didn’t think I could face another one of our attempted dates. I didn’t have the physical or emotional energy to deal with yet another disaster without having a total meltdown. “Can I take a rain check?” I asked. “I suspect we’ll need to get together tomorrow night anyway so we can scope out Idris’s ads and you can tell me what you see so we can compare.”

  “Oh, right. Good point. Tomorrow night, then?” If I hadn’t come to know him as well as I had, I wouldn’t have been able to see the disappointment in his eyes.

  That night I told my roommates about the party, and they were both so enthusiastic that they spent most of the evening digging around in the closet to come up with costume ideas. “A masked ball for New Year’s is genius,” Gemma said, holding a red pashmina around her head, Little Red Riding Hood style. “You can try out being someone else as the calendar changes. There’s all kinds of symbolism there.”

  “This is that really hot guy you know who’s hosting it, right?” Marcia asked.

  “Yeah, he’s Owen’s best friend.”

  “And what’s his job again?”

/>   “He’s head of Personnel.”

  “Oh.” There was something about the way she said it that made me wonder if she was going to bother passing the invitation on to her boyfriend, Jeff.

  The next morning, I put on Owen’s necklace as I got dressed. I might have to take it off once I got to the office, but if there was any chance my immunity might be dimmed, I wanted to be sure to know that magic was in use around me. Owen met me on the sidewalk in front of my building with a cup of take-out coffee. “Let me guess, this is your own special blend,” I said as I took the cup from him.

  “A very special blend, indeed. You’re wearing the locket.”

  “Yes. I thought it might come in handy.”

  “That’s not the purpose I intended it for, but it works, I suppose.”

  I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like plain old coffee to me, the way I took it with cream and sugar. I couldn’t detect whatever drug or potion he’d put in it. “So, this is the dose that’s really going to do it, huh?” I asked.

  “You probably won’t notice the effects until late today. We’ll give it a test this afternoon, then I’ll give you a final dose before we leave work. Tonight I thought you could take a look at the subway ads, and then we could have dinner at my place and watch for TV ads. That is, if you don’t have other plans?”

  “No, nothing else planned.”

  “Great. Then tomorrow we can visit Times Square and run by the store.”

  My neck began to tingle from the necklace as we boarded the subway, and sure enough, there were the Spellworks ads. I still saw them the same way I had all week, so I must have been fully immune. Although I knew we needed me to do this, I couldn’t help but feel relieved that I still had my immunity. It had been a scary, helpless feeling the last time. Maybe it wasn’t too late to tell Owen I’d changed my mind. He’d be all for stopping the potion and coming up with a plan B, since he’d been opposed to this in the first place. But I knew it was important. We needed all the information we could get, and this was the quickest and easiest way to go about getting it.

  When we approached the MSI office building, the necklace began to vibrate. I realized I wouldn’t be able to wear it at work at all. By the time I decided to take it off, it was almost painful. I was ready to grab it and break the chain, just to get it off my neck, but Owen stepped in and unfastened it for me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I may need to rethink this. There may be a better approach. But for now, it would probably be best if you avoid wearing it around the office. Power is so amplified in this building that it will drive you crazy.” He handed it to me, and I could still feel it buzzing in my hand, so I quickly dropped it into my purse.

  We got to Owen’s lab and then both of us stopped short. One of the largest bouquets of flowers I’d ever seen sat in the middle of one of the lab tables, the piles of papers shoved aside.

  “I wonder if those are for you or for me,” Owen said.

  Fifteen

  I stepped forward and dug through the foliage to find a card. There was one with my name on it, but the inside said merely, “Thank you for everything, with my deepest devotion.” It wasn’t signed.

  “They’re apparently for me,” I said, “but it looks like I have a secret admirer. I don’t know who sent them.” I gave Owen a sidelong glance to gauge his reaction, but he just frowned. I knew he was physically incapable of playing it cool in a situation like this, so that was a good sign he hadn’t sent the flowers. If he’d been involved at all, he’d have been blushing furiously and unable to look at me.

  He half closed his eyes and walked around the table, holding his hands out. Then he shook his head. “There’s no magic here. The flowers themselves aren’t magical in origin, and I don’t detect any hidden spells.” He sneezed violently. “However, there does appear to be some pollen.”

  My eyes watered at the strong, sickeningly sweet scent of the stargazer lilies in the arrangement. I tended to think of those as funeral flowers. “Yeah, the lilies are going to make me queasy if we keep them in here. Maybe that was the dastardly plan of whoever sent them.”

  “If you don’t mind, I can get rid of them.”

  “Please.”

  He waved a hand, mumbled a few words, and the flowers vanished. Then he set about putting the piles of papers that had been rearranged back into place. “I wonder who sent those,” he mused out loud as he worked. “It wouldn’t have been any of your friends, would it?”

  “A huge bouquet sounds like Philip’s style, though I would have expected a formal thank-you note along with it if he’d sent it to thank me for my help in getting his business back. And I haven’t yet actually accomplished anything there other than hooking him up with a lawyer.”

  Only as Owen went off to his office to get to work and I went to my own desk did it occur to me that it also seemed like something Ethelinda might have done. The size and general tackiness of the bouquet certainly fit her taste. I’d hope Philip would have been more tasteful than that, though the Edwardian era wasn’t exactly known for its restraint and subtlety. If Ethelinda had sent flowers anonymously, she either had to be trying to make Owen jealous or make me mad at Owen because he wasn’t sending me flowers when someone else was, while also distracting me from Owen by raising the possibility of a secret admirer. If it was Ethelinda, that was the final proof of just how clueless she was. It hadn’t seemed to cross Owen’s mind to be jealous, and I wasn’t the least bit interested in the fictional secret admirer. I also wasn’t the kind of woman who’d want Owen to be jealous. I’d hope he’d trust me and my feelings for him. Besides, when in the past few weeks had I had time to meet someone who could admire me secretly?

  Late in the afternoon, Owen came around the corner to my office, looking grave. “Are you ready to test your immunity?” he asked.

  “I suppose it’s too late to change my mind, huh?”

  “This was your idea in the first place. I argued against it.”

  “Yeah, and I keep kicking myself. Well, let’s see how effective your potion was.”

  He held out his left hand, palm open. Then he waved his right hand over it and a coin appeared in his palm. “What do you see?”

  I leaned over to get a better look. “A quarter. You’re not doing one of your stage magic tricks, are you?”

  He passed his right hand over his left again, and that time I could feel the tingle of magic in use. If I’d been wearing the locket, it would have given me a jolt. “Okay, now what do you see?” he asked.

  “A quarter,” I replied with a shrug.

  “That’s all? Are you sure?”

  “Sorry. It’s one of the special state quarters, if that helps.” I started to turn away, then saw something colorful out of the corner of my eye. I blinked and turned back slowly, but the image faded when I looked at it head-on. “Okay, wait a second, I saw something in my peripheral vision, but it’s fading in and out.”

  “It looks like you need another dose. I don’t know if it will have taken full effect by this evening, though.”

  I followed him back out into the main lab, where he mixed up the potion and handed me a glass. “If the magic thing doesn’t work out for you, you’ve got a future as a bartender,” I quipped before I drank the potion, which was tea-flavored again.

  He looked worried as he watched me drink. “I hope I got the dosage right. I may have underestimated your body weight.”

  “Don’t ever apologize to a woman for that.”

  He grinned. “I know. And notice that I was smart enough not to ask. I’m not entirely ignorant where women are concerned.” He checked his watch. “Let’s give that dose another hour to work, and then we’ll test you again.” I went back to my desk and tried to work, even though I was nervous about really losing my magical immunity. Part of me couldn’t help hoping that the potion didn’t work, after all, and it would turn out that I was no longer capable of being rendered susceptible to magic.

  When Owen came back to my desk an hour later, I got a sick fee
ling in my stomach. “Here we go again,” I said. “Give me your best shot, O great and powerful Oz.”

  “Oz wasn’t a real wizard. I am,” he said with his typical straightforwardness. This time, he didn’t bother playing magic tricks. He simply held out the hand with a quarter in his palm, said a few words under his breath, and then asked, “Now what do you see?”

  “A Sacagawea dollar?”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding. I see a quarter. Sorry.” But then I caught another one of those glimpses out of the corner of my eye. If I squinted just right as I turned my head, I could keep that image in place instead of it fading back to a quarter. “It’s one of those rainbow-colored bouncy balls, like you get in a gumball machine.”

  “That’s it. But you can’t see it without squinting like that?”

  “Not really. I can’t quite keep the image in focus. But it’s better than the last time when I could only see it out of the corner of my eye.”

  “You’re being a difficult case, you know.”

  “I had to pick some area in life to be high-maintenance. Maybe the drugs lose their potency on you after a while. Or maybe it’s harder to lose your immunity each time.” That could also mean it would take longer to get the immunity back. I didn’t like the idea of essentially losing a sense for very long while we had enemies out to get us.

  “Do you still want to give things a try tonight, or would it be a waste of time?”

  I looked up at his worried blue eyes and remembered the feeling I got the first time I met him, when he’d been almost too shy to speak to me at all. “Being with you is never a waste of time,” I said as butterflies formed in my stomach. “That is, if you don’t care how much work gets done tonight.”

  He pinkened slightly, but he held my gaze instead of looking bashfully at the floor. “It’s all just a ruse to get you alone with me, anyway. Anything we might accomplish is a bonus. The way I see it, if we’re in my very heavily warded house, that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to put us in danger or tinker with our plans and we might actually be able to spend time together without too many distractions.”