Once Upon Stilettos (Enchanted Inc #2)

by Shanna Swendson

In the outside hallway, there was an even larger crowd. It was as if someone had gotten on the company intercom and announced that there was free food outside R&D. Gregor and Kim were there from Verification. Minerva Phelps of Prophets and Lost stood in front of the group, like she’d been the first arrival. Dortmund, the accounting gnome, was elbowing people in the knees as he worked his way to the front.

  If Merlin had been any other boss, he would have said, “Don’t you people have jobs?” and sent them scurrying to stir up more rumors based on half-truths and guesses. Instead, he faced the crowd and said in a commanding voice, “It appears that we have a traitor in our midst. Please be aware of the activity around you and report anything suspicious to Miss Chandler, who will be managing the investigation. Now you may return to your work. The situation is under control.”

  When Merlin went into ancient-sorcerer-who-built-an-empire mode, people tended to listen, so the crowd dispersed rapidly. When they were gone, I said, “I guess we’re not investigating covertly anymore.”

  He sighed, and he was once again a very elderly man in a difficult position. “It didn’t seem likely that we could maintain any secrecy, so I felt it best to adapt our strategy. You will surely be overwhelmed with reports of suspicious behavior, but it’s possible that a germ of truth will be within. You’ll have to use your discernment to sort through it all wisely.”

  “So you’re not going to reassign the investigation to people who know what they’re doing, now that we’ve been outed?” I asked hopefully.

  “I see no need to make any changes at this point. Please continue your efforts.”

  I could see already that I’d have to sit down with Isabel to get the scoop on the entire company so I’d be able to tell who had a grudge against whom and for what reason. Without being up on all the dirty laundry, it would be impossible to sort the malicious reports from the possible facts. Then again, there was always the possibility that someone who had a reason for a grudge might be telling the truth.

  This was a whole new kind of verification, and it had nothing to do with seeing past magic. It would take seeing the truth in each person’s heart and soul.

  Piece of cake. Yeah, right. I wondered if it was too late to opt out of my part in the saving-the-world-from-bad-magic gig.

  By the time I got back to my own office, I had twelve e-mails and four voice mails. I checked to make sure there was nothing urgent in the mix, but they were all tips. I saved the voice mails and transferred the e-mails into a new folder I created for the investigation. It was almost five and I didn’t feel like I could face sorting through all that negativity. It could wait until morning.

  I moved my things from Trix’s desk back to my own office, then got my coat and bag and headed out. I was surprised to bump into Owen in the lobby. “I don’t remember the last time I saw you going home this early. I mean, other than when you’d had your shoulder ripped to shreds,” I remarked.

  “I suppose one good thing to come of this is the fact that sealing off the department means I have to go home on time.”

  “You could probably use the rest anyway.”

  Then we reversed our morning routine, walking to the subway station from the office, side by side and almost in step. “So you got the ugly job of sorting through all this,” he said.

  “Yeah. I wonder what I did to deserve it.”

  “You’ve got a level head and a knack for seeing through all kinds of illusions,” he replied.

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I wasn’t. I think you’re probably best for the job. You don’t have any real ax to grind, unlike most of us who’ve worked there a long time.”

  I looked at him suspiciously. “You have grudges and enemies and all that, too?”

  “Let’s just say that there are people I don’t trust. I wouldn’t go out of my way to hurt them, and I wouldn’t frame them. But I wouldn’t be sad to see evidence pointing at them, and I might not be as discerning as I should be at deciding whether to believe that evidence.” He shrugged. “The problem with a company this old and this stable is that not only have most of us been working there our entire adult lives, but our parents and grandparents also worked there. Some of these grudges and feuds go back generations.”

  “It’s nice to hear that the company man isn’t entirely a thing of the past.”

  “When you’re dealing with inherited job skills, it’s more likely. I suppose you could inherit a head for figures or a talent for art or music, but when the skill that makes you right for a job is a genetic trait, you get multiple generations in the same job. I’m one of the few outsiders in the company in a job that nobody in my family had before me. At least, as far as I know.”

  I remembered that he’d said he was an orphan who didn’t know who his parents were. Although I was curious about his background, I didn’t know if that was a touchy subject for him, so instead I said, “I guess you, Merlin, and I are in the same boat, then. He’s not technically an outsider, since he was the founder, but he doesn’t really know anyone else in the company.”

  “That’s one of the reasons he was brought back. We didn’t know if we could trust our previous leadership. We needed someone above suspicion with no ties to the current employees.”

  I was dying to ask him what he meant by that, but we’d reached the subway station, where a platform full of rush-hour commuters wasn’t the best place to talk about magic.

  I used to hate riding the subway at rush hour, but since I’d started commuting with Owen, I’d learned to like it a lot better. He could reach the overhead bar, and since I couldn’t, he’d hold me steady with an arm around my waist. I had a feeling that was the only way I’d ever get contact that intimate with him, so I had to enjoy it where I found it. Standing like that with him made me remember every romance-novel cliché I’d ever read about weak knees and pounding pulses, while it didn’t seem to affect him at all. Reason number seven-hundred sixty-eight why I was pretty sure he didn’t feel about me the way I felt about him.

  I felt a pang of disappointment when we lurched to a stop at the Union Square station and shoved our way to the doors. My daily time with Owen had nearly come to an end. I’d have to wait until the next morning when I emerged from my building to see him again.

  Oh boy, did I have it bad. I thought I’d talked myself out of the crush that ate Cleveland, but no matter how many pep talks I gave myself about how an ultrapowerful wizard of mysterious parentage might make a great fantasy-novel hero but would probably make a lousy boyfriend for a girl like me, and no matter how many clues I found that proved he saw me as nothing more than a friend, the next time I saw him, it started all over again. If I didn’t know for sure that magic didn’t work on me, I’d have suspected him of using one of Rod’s attraction spells.

  We finally came aboveground and I took a deep breath of fresh (or what passed for fresh in the city) air. I started to head for the crosswalk, but Owen paused. He frowned as if in thought, then said, “Do you have any plans for dinner?”

  “Not that I can think of. Both my roommates said they had late meetings this evening, so I’m on my own.”

  “After today, I don’t even have the energy to throw something in the microwave. Do you want to get some dinner?”

  My heart did back handsprings worthy of the Olympic gymnastics team while my brain reminded it that this didn’t sound like a date. It was merely two single people who didn’t want to eat alone. “Sure,” I said with what I hoped looked like a casual shrug instead of a nervous spasm.

  He smiled and his blue eyes lit up. “I know a great little diner down the street. It’s nothing fancy, just good food and a lot of variety. I’ve been eating there for years, and I haven’t had anything bad yet.”

  You could probably poison Owen and he wouldn’t complain, but I’d also learned that he didn’t give a compliment he didn’t mean wholeheartedly, so I said, “I’ll take that as a recommendation. It sounds wonderful.”

  He led the way across Fourteenth an
d then down a block to a little corner diner. It would have been nice if he’d held my hand, taken my arm, or even put a guiding hand to my back, but this was really the first time we’d been together in a nonwork capacity, so I reminded myself not to let my imagination run away with me. This was not a date.

  The waitress who met us at the door appeared to know Owen, for she greeted him like an old friend. “Well, hey there, handsome. I thought you’d abandoned me,” she teased.

  He turned crimson and didn’t meet her eyes as he said, “I haven’t been eating out much lately.”

  “As long as you’re not cheating on me with some other waitress. Would a booth work for you tonight?” she flirted.

  “That’ll be fine, thanks,” he said mildly, his color gradually returning to normal.

  The waitress put a little extra wiggle in her walk as she led us to our table. She was old enough to be Owen’s mother, but he still seemed to have the same effect on her as he had on me. She plunked napkin-wrapped rolls of silverware and laminated menus in front of us with a warm “Here you go,” then got a pad out of her apron pocket and asked, “Now, what can I get you to drink?”

  We both asked for water, and I was surprised that she was as friendly to me as she was to Owen. Maybe she was merely enjoying having a good-looking man around without getting possessive about him. I liked her better already.

  “You really must eat here all the time,” I teased Owen as soon as she was out of earshot. “You’ve definitely made an impression.” I was rewarded with a slight pinkening of his ears as he kept his eyes focused on his menu. Someday I’d have to catalog his various kinds of blushes and see if there was a correlation to the kind of embarrassment. “Any recommendations?” I asked.

  “As I said, everything I’ve tried has been good. I like their burgers. The Greek food’s good. The turkey and stuffing remind me of Thanksgiving at home.”

  There was yet another tantalizing mention of home. I was dying to ask more, but I’d have to know more about him to be able to ask him more about himself. From what little I knew of Owen, I had a feeling he’d tell me what he wanted to tell me, regardless of what questions I asked.

  I chose to start at a broader level. We could get more personal later in the meal. “There’s a café a lot like this in my hometown, except it’s only open for breakfast and lunch, and the waitresses call you ‘hon’ and ‘shug.’”

  “There seems to be a place like this in just about every small town in America,” he replied, his eyes still on his menu.

  “Are you from a small town, too?” Now we were getting somewhere.

  “I’m not sure where I was born, and I have the vaguest memories of living in a city when I was very young, but I grew up in a tiny old village up the Hudson.”

  The part of me that harbored the killer crush gloated at my more rational side as one of the possible barriers between us melted away. I’d thought of us as so radically different that we’d never be able to find common ground, but if he was a small-town boy, then on some level we might have a similar background.

  “I imagine your definition of ‘old’ in this part of the world is different from mine,” I said.

  “Pre–Revolutionary War,” he said with a nod.

  “Yeah, very different. My hometown dates from not much more than a hundred years ago.”

  “These days, it’s a suburb of New York, about an hour away by train, but it used to be a farming community. They still have a colonial farm nearby for the tourists.”

  “With the land prices around here, you probably can’t afford to farm.” Even as I kept up the small talk, I wanted to bang my head against the table. Did he even know what he was doing when he neatly deflected anything that might become personal, or was it an old habit? Or was he hiding something?

  The waitress returned with two glasses of water. She set them down on the table in front of us, then got out her pad and pen once more. “Ready to order?”

  Owen nodded toward me. “I’ll have the bacon cheeseburger,” I said.

  “You want the full plate with fries and slaw?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She turned to Owen, who said, “I’ll have the same.”

  She noted this in her pad and said, “It’ll be right out.”

  I felt like our earlier conversation had lost its momentum, if it ever had any to begin with. While I was still trying to think of another topic, he surprised me by starting one of his own. “You never did tell me how your date with Ethan went, other than that it was nice and that something odd happened. Where did he take you? He said he had something different planned.”

  My heart and my head went to war over what this question meant. Was this relationship recon, his attempt to see where my current relationship (if you could call it that) stood so he’d know when or if to make his move? Or was it casual interest because two of his friends were going out together and he was curious how it went?

  While the battle raged within me, I decided to just answer instead of analyzing it to death. “He took me to a wine dinner, one of those things where they create courses to go with certain wines from a particular vineyard. It was interesting. The food was good, but I don’t know enough about wine to say much about that.”

  “And what was the odd part?”

  “I’m a total lightweight. I almost never have more than one glass of wine at any one time, and they served a glass with each course. I tried to only drink half a glass each time, but after five courses that’s still a lot of wine.”

  “So you were a bit toasted,” he said with a teasing grin. Even if it was at my expense, I enjoyed the sight too much to complain.

  “No ‘a bit’ about it. And here’s where it gets interesting.”

  He leaned back against the booth, now looking at me directly, still grinning. “Interesting, how?” He raised one eyebrow.

  I glanced around to see how close any other diners were to us then leaned forward across the table. He got the hint and leaned forward until there was only a small space separating us. “I was the most sober person there, other than Ethan. It turned out to be a magical winery,” I whispered. “The wine was enchanted, so everyone else there was even drunker than I was. After dinner, they passed out order forms so people could buy the wines, and it seemed like they were using a variation on that control spell to make people order wine at what Ethan said were outrageously inflated prices.”

  “So they were using a wine dinner as a cover for a magical scam?” He managed to scowl, look incredulous, and smile all at the same time.

  “Yeah. So Ethan and I called them on it. I don’t think they expected to find a couple of immunes in the party. He offered to fix their ‘typos.’”

  “Did you tell the boss?”

  “Yeah, and Sales says they stopped being an MSI customer about a year ago.”

  “You think the spell was a variation on Idris’s control spell?”

  “I’m no expert, remember, but I did feel power in use, and there was something about it that looked similar, but it was also different. It didn’t seem to be nearly as strong as the one I watched you test.”

  He nodded and frowned. “Interesting. I wonder if there’s a connection. It’s worth investigating.”

  “Are you ready to eat, or am I interrupting a private moment here?” The waitress’s voice startled both of us. Owen blushed bright pink and my cheeks felt uncomfortably warm as we moved back so she could set down our plates. “You two enjoy. Let me know if you need anything else,” she said.

  “So, what happened after you foiled their scam?” he asked as he struggled to get catsup out of the bottle onto his fries. His injured arm must have still been bothering him, because he wasn’t very effective at either holding the bottle steady or hitting it, so I reached across the table, took it from him, and poured catsup for him as I answered.

  “I don’t remember much else. It got blurry after that point. I remember being in a cab, then Ethan carried me out of the cab but woke me up before we had to
climb the stairs. One of my roommates made sure he hadn’t taken advantage of my condition, and that was pretty much it.”

  After getting enough catsup out for him, I went to work putting some on my own fries. Now that I thought about it, I was surprised that I hadn’t heard from Ethan since then. He hadn’t had any meetings at MSI, but that hadn’t stopped him from dropping by before. He hadn’t even called me. I knew guys didn’t want to appear too eager by calling too soon, but Ethan hadn’t seemed the type for that. Had I put him off with my drunken belligerence?

  “It sounds better than your last date with him.”

  “And that one was no thanks to you.” My first date with Ethan had been when Rod and Owen tested him for magical immunity. It got rather weird, to put it mildly. “Why can’t I seem to have a social life without work getting in the way?”

  “Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of job you can get away from. Once you become part of our world, it’s difficult to truly escape from it.”

  “I notice you left that part out of the company recruiting pitch, along with the part where we have to save the world.” He saved himself from having to answer by taking a conveniently timed bite of burger. I picked up a french fry and pushed it around in the pool of catsup on my plate. “That’s the part that takes getting used to, the idea that things I do now really make a difference. In my old job I was lucky if anything I did still mattered a week later.”

  “It’s taking some adjusting for me, too. I always hoped I’d make a difference, of course, but I thought my contribution would be hiding in a lab somewhere doing translations and research. I wasn’t supposed to be on the front lines.”

  So our resident superhero was a reluctant one. That was a sobering realization. “I guess we all do our parts, huh?”

  “We don’t have much choice.”

  After that, we both concentrated on eating for a while. I had a lot to think about. On one level, I hadn’t learned much new about him for my mental fact file other than where he grew up. But on another, it was like I’d gained a whole new insight into his personality.