Once Upon Stilettos (Enchanted Inc #2)

by Shanna Swendson

  “And it’s not like she’s going to learn about the magical issues while she’s here.”

  Before I could counter that, I noticed something in the sky, something larger than a pigeon and growing larger as it came closer to us. I grabbed Owen’s arm and shoved him out of the way before an ugly half woman/half bird dove at us out of the sky. The last time I’d seen one of those things, it had been digging its claws into Owen’s shoulder. The harpy swooped back up to the sky and began another dive.

  “What is it?” Owen asked, his voice tense.

  “Harpy, I think.”

  He frowned for a second, then nodded. “Got it.” At that moment, the harpy seemed to hit an invisible brick wall in the sky, then fell to the sidewalk with a splat. A business-suited commuter casually stepped around the body, then continued on his way, as if dead mythical creatures on the sidewalk were something he encountered every morning. I wondered what he saw instead of seeing a harpy—a pile of trash, maybe? That wouldn’t be out of place on a New York sidewalk, but as far as I knew, trash didn’t fall from the sky or appear out of thin air. The ability of New Yorkers to focus on their own business and tune out everything else never ceased to amaze me.

  I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Okay, that’s why I don’t want my parents in New York. How do you explain something like that—the street people are breeding with the pigeons?”

  “Your parents likely wouldn’t see anything extraordinary.”

  “So, what would they see when something dropped out of the sky and started ripping them to shreds? There’s no way for anyone to make that look normal.”

  He took my arm and steered me back into the flow of pedestrian traffic on the way to the subway station. “I doubt they’d come after your parents. This attack was probably aimed at me, and if I know Phelan Idris, he wants to shake me up more than he wants to hurt me. If I’m thinking about ways to protect the city against harpies, I’m not working on ways to counter his spells.”

  “He nearly killed you with one of those things the last time,” I reminded him.

  “It was only a flesh wound. But just in case, I’ll talk to Sam about getting a security detail for your parents.”

  “I know you’re trying to help, and I appreciate it, but somehow the thought of a group of gargoyles following my parents around the city isn’t what I’d call reassuring.”

  If the commute was unusual that morning, the office was even weirder. The moment we entered the building, I felt a changed atmosphere. Instead of friendly greetings from co-workers I passed on my way up to my office, there were cold stares. And it wasn’t just me. Nobody spoke to Owen, either, and I’d noticed previously that he was generally well respected. Nobody made eye contact with anyone else when they passed in the hall. It was like everyone saw everyone else as a possible traitor. I ducked out of the way when I passed Gregor in the hallway. He was bright green and yelling at someone who was yelling back at him about using the verifiers to his advantage.

  Trix was already at her desk when I got to Merlin’s office suite. “Are you feeling better?” I asked.

  “It’s amazing what a ton of chocolate and three back-to-back viewings of Thelma and Louise can do for your outlook on life,” she said grimly.

  “That bad?”

  “He filled up my voice mail with apologies.”

  “Sounds like a positive sign.”

  “Ari said to let him stew until Thursday, not go out with him this weekend, and then by Monday he’d be eating out of my hand.”

  “Or you could patch things up now and be back in swing by this weekend,” I suggested. Ari’s way seemed a little harsh to me, unless he’d done something awful enough to deserve it.

  She sighed. “That’s what I thought. Maybe I’ll do that and not tell Ari. I miss him too much already to drag it out another week.” She abruptly shifted gears. “I hear we had a little excitement yesterday.”

  There had to be an e-mail list for company gossip, and apparently I wasn’t on it. “Yeah, a bit. R and D is in lockdown, with actual guards at the doors. The boss has turned my phone into a tip line, so you can guess what my day will be like. Speaking of which, I’m probably going to have to wade through about a thousand messages, so I’d better get to work.”

  I wasn’t too far off the mark. Combining phone messages and e-mails, I had seven hundred seventy-five messages. How many employees were there? Somebody had to have left multiple messages.

  I went through the voice mail first so I could clear out the mailbox for future calls. Most of the so-called tips were useless, just repeating information I already knew. I didn’t need a tipster to tell me to check out the people who worked inside R&D, for example.

  “You should look into Melisande Rogers from Corporate Sales,” said a typical message. “She’s been taking a lot of business lunches that no one else in the department knows about.” The tip was anonymous, but it came from an extension registered to Outside Sales.

  The next message said, “Dagmar Holloway in Outside Sales has been acting suspicious lately. I hear her sales numbers are dropping, too.” The tipster had called from a Corporate Sales extension. This was starting to sound like the girls’ bathroom at lunchtime in a junior high school.

  The e-mails were even worse:

  Hi, i’m writing this from my home account because i don’t want you to no who i am but your should chek on kim in verification she’s always taking notes and that makes me suspishus. She’s also a stuck-up bitch and you can tell her i said so. She’s also been staying late at teh office and i think she’s up to something.

  And that was one of the more literate ones. I felt like I had to read each one all the way through in case there really was worthwhile information buried in all the venom. While some of the intrigue was fascinating, in many cases I’d read economics textbooks that were more gripping. I didn’t need a log of anyone’s daily activities, including bathroom visits.

  And the work kept piling up. While I listened to a message, at least one more came in. I had to turn my computer’s sound off so the constant ding of incoming e-mail notifications didn’t drive me bonkers. As I finished charting the tip from an e-mail, my phone would ring. Finally, I got caught up, but I didn’t feel like I’d made any real progress on the investigation.

  With a groan, I got up and staggered to the outer office. “Trix, coffee, please!” I begged. “This company may be too much for even Dr. Phil to help. We might want to go straight to beating each other over the head with chairs like on Jerry Springer.” Then I noticed the person standing at Trix’s desk. It was my date from Saturday night, the date I hadn’t heard from since then, come to think of it.

  “Hi, Katie,” Ethan said. “Rough day?”

  “You have no idea.” I turned to Trix. “Coffee?” I whimpered. A steaming cup soon appeared in my hand. I was glad I didn’t have to actually make pots of coffee. This way, I didn’t know how many cups I was drinking, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “I hear you’ve got some excitement going on around here,” Ethan said, leaning casually against Trix’s desk. “I tried to drop in on Owen, but Security wouldn’t let me past the door. Then I thought I’d come up here and say hi and see what was going on.”

  I ignored the implication that visiting me was an afterthought to dropping in on his buddy. “We’ve apparently got a spy/saboteur/double agent, something like that. The boss put me in charge of collecting tips, and my phone is about to melt.” I turned to Trix. “Doesn’t anyone in this company like anyone else in this company? This is insane.”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said with a shrug and a raised eyebrow. “It’s no worse than some law firms I’ve worked with. Someone would drop the slightest hint of innuendo and it was like throwing a hunk of raw meat into a shark tank. It was sometimes kind of funny.”

  I faced him with a glare. “If you did this on purpose to see what would happen, now would be the time to confess. I might even let you live.”

  “I agree wit
h Katie,” Trix said. “I’ve been getting the overflow, and it’s brutal.”

  “This seems to be the chance to settle all your old scores,” I said. “Maybe we should just throw everyone into the conference room with some of those foam bat things and let them all get it out of their systems.”

  “You don’t think they’d stick to foam, do you?” Trix asked.

  “You’re right. We’d be busy for months disenchanting the entire staff after they all turned each other into cockroaches and dung beetles.”

  Ethan stood up straighter and said to me, “Do you have time to talk? I know you’re busy. This’ll only take a minute.”

  He sounded serious, so I was instantly concerned. “Of course. Come on into my office.” As I left I said over my shoulder, “Thanks for the coffee, Trix.”

  While I set my coffee down on my desk, Ethan closed my door behind him. I was on the verge of real worry when he stepped forward and pulled me to him in a big hug, then kissed me. He was grinning when he let me go. “Was that what you wanted to see me about?” I asked. The kiss had left me dizzy and breathless, most likely because it was so unexpected. In our extremely short relationship, we’d never come close to kissing.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I didn’t think you really wanted that to happen out in the lobby.”

  “Us dating is the worst-kept secret in the company. Even Merlin knows. But thanks for the attempt at discretion.”

  He settled into my guest chair. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to call yesterday. How have you been? It wasn’t too bad a hangover, was it?”

  I sat down and took a sip of coffee. “I’m fine. I’ve had worse hangovers. Not many, granted. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a wine connoisseur, though. You’d have to be able to get through one of those dinners without getting blitzed.”

  “It’s like any sport. You have to train and work up to it. But I promise, no getting you drunk next time. And speaking of next time, what are you doing Friday night?”

  “If the rest of the week goes like this, very possibly I’ll be putting my head in the oven.”

  “Dinner with me might be more fun than that.”

  “I may be begging you to get me drunk by then.”

  “Only if you insist. So it’s a date?”

  I studied him for a long moment. True, he wasn’t Owen, but if the night before had taught me anything, it was that as cute as Owen was, whatever it took to bridge the gap from friends to lovers apparently wasn’t there for us—at least, not from his side of things. Even I was beginning to pick up on and maybe even welcome the brother vibe. It wasn’t like Ethan was sloppy seconds, either. It was entirely possible that if I put Owen out of my mind for more than a few minutes, something might happen with Ethan. The kiss had been a good start.

  “It’s a date,” I said. “Should we leave from here, meet somewhere later, or what?”

  “We can leave from here. I’m not planning anything fancy you’d need to change clothes for.”

  “What are you planning?”

  He gave me a wink. “That would be a surprise. See you Friday after work.” Then he got out of his chair, opened the office door, and left.

  Within seconds, Trix was hovering in my doorway. “Hmm, looks like the date last weekend went well.”

  “I guess so.”

  “He did come to ask you out, right?”

  “Yeah, looks like it. Did he have any other business here?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. He’d just shown up when you came out in a caffeine frenzy. I think he was here specifically to see you.”

  “Wow.” I wasn’t used to someone actually pursuing me—aside from the brief time when Jeff was stalking me, and that was part of an enchantment, anyway. I had to admit it was kind of nice.

  “He’s not bad at all, for a human.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I could do a lot worse. I have done a lot worse. And now I need to think of something to wear to work Friday that will carry over to a casual post-work date.”

  “Did he tell you where you’ll be going?”

  “He said it was a surprise.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Men! Don’t they know we need to prepare ourselves?”

  She had just fluttered away when Merlin appeared. “Have you made any progress on the investigation?” he asked.

  “Just enough to know that all of our employees are entirely dysfunctional. Is there a company policy against magical duels during working hours on company property? I sure hope so.”

  “Have none of the tips been helpful?”

  “No, not really. Most of them have nothing to do with the immediate situation.” My phone rang and I ignored it, letting it add to the pileup of voice mail. “I’m starting to wonder if that might be the point to all this. Maybe it’s more about sabotage than about spying.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “Well, think about it. If everyone’s making calls to rat out their co-workers, they’re not doing their work. You can’t have effective teamwork if people don’t trust each other, and nobody trusts each other right now. We’re at a standstill.”

  He stroked his beard in thought. “You may be right. How would you go about investigating that angle?”

  Suddenly it struck me that this was something I knew all about. I was from a small town, so I was an expert in gossip. I might not know anything about investigating corporate espionage, but I knew all about how rumors spread. With increased confidence, I said, “Track the grapevine to its source. Find out who told whom what and when. You said it yourself yesterday—the only people who knew about the spying were you, Owen, me, and the spy. If we find out who was the first one so eager to let others know there might be a spy, it might lead us to our mole.”

  “Excellent deduction. I look forward to seeing the results. Please keep me posted.”

  Coming up with a reasonably valid-sounding theory made me bold enough to say, “Sir? There is one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What is it, Katie?”

  “My parents are coming to town next week, for Thanksgiving. I know we already get Thursday and Friday off. I was wondering if I could maybe take a little more time off that week, just a few hours here and there. I know we’re busy, and I’ve got this investigation to work on, but if I’m spending time with them, then they can’t be asking to visit me at work.”

  “I don’t see a problem with that. We can see how things are going later in the week and decide then when would be best for you to take off.”

  “Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

  “In the meantime, continue your efforts. That was an excellent theory. Good work.”

  There was one possibility with my theory that I hated to consider. If the object was more to stir things up than to actually spy, it took Owen off my “safe” list. What better way to stir things up than to report spying that hadn’t actually happened?

  I wouldn’t be able to bear it if one of the few people I absolutely trusted was actually betraying me.

  Now that I knew I was tracking a rumor, I knew exactly how to approach the situation. It was like that old game of telephone—the message changed as it moved farther from the source, and the tone of the message shift gave you a pretty good idea of who was part of the chain. The closer the rumor got to the actual truth (or the obviously manufactured lie), the closer you were to the original source. I hadn’t been a member of any particular clique in high school but had moved freely among all of them, and because of that I’d generally been tapped as the mediator in school rivalries. That made me an expert in figuring out who had said what to whom. I even had the “Miss Congeniality” picture in the yearbook to prove it.

  This meant I’d have to leave the office. “I have to look into some things,” I told Trix as I headed out. “All the calls should go straight into voice mail.” Not listening to more gripes and whines was a price I’d have to pay for my diligence.

  One thing I knew about gossip is that there’s always someone who sees all and kno
ws all, even if she’s not involved in it. In this company, that was Isabel. If anyone in the company knew what the major feuds were, she’d be the one. She’d probably refereed most of them. The trick would be getting information out of her without giving her anything worth spreading. “Got a minute?” I asked when I got to her office.

  “Rod’s out right now.”

  “Actually, you were the one I wanted to talk to.”

  Her face lit up and I braced myself for a smothering hug, but she stayed seated. “Come on in, then. Can I get you anything?”

  I’d had enough caffeine for the week, so I shook my head. “No thanks. But maybe you can help me with something.”

  “The spy investigation, huh?” she said with a knowing nod.

  “It’s turned into a massive grudge fest, and I need to know who has reason to hate whom so I can sort out the tips from the tattletales.”

  “You want a list of the grudges in this company? How much time do you have?”

  “Not nearly enough. But anything you can do to help me narrow it down would get me that much further along.”

  She leaned back in her chair and folded her hands across her middle. “Well, you know about Gregor and Owen, of course.”

  “I know Owen got Gregor’s job after that accident. Is there more?”

  “Well, when he was in charge of that division, Gregor and Idris were pretty tight, and neither of them got along with Owen. The rest of the division took sides. It was like there was the Gregor faction and the Owen faction. One of the first things Owen did when he got the promotion after Gregor’s accident and transfer was fire Idris.”

  “What happened to the rest of the Gregor faction?”

  “The usual things that happen after a regime change. One or two quit. The rest changed which ass they were kissing. You’d have thought they were pulling for Owen all along.”

  I wanted to demand names, but this was already sounding too much like a police interview. “Was Gregor into the same dark magic stuff as Idris?” I asked.

  “Owen thought so, but there wasn’t any real proof. That spell that turned him into an ogre was definitely a gray area—assuming he was really working on the spell he said he was. Owen always thought that was a huge cover-up.”