Marcia played a dramatic air violin solo while Gemma dabbed away imaginary tears. “It’s like something out of Dickens,” she said with an audible sigh. “You know how else you could ease his loneliness?”
“Ask him out!” Marcia answered. “That’s the only way to find out if he’s interested in you or just shy.”
I snorted and returned to my icing, which had started to harden while I was chatting. “I’d have to get recertified in CPR before I could ask him out,” I said, stirring vigorously. “He’d keel over and die. Besides, I don’t want to do something like that on the rebound. When the time’s right, I’ll know.”
They looked at each other. “Is there any wonder she hasn’t been laid in five years?” Marcia asked.
I discovered the next morning that baking the cookies or even sneaking them into the highly secured department wasn’t going to be my biggest secret Santa challenge. First, I had to get my treats to work without cluing Owen in. That was difficult, given that he waited for me outside my building every morning and escorted me to work.
I came to the conclusion that me carrying something unusual wouldn’t raise any suspicions, since everyone had a secret Santa assignment, and I’d be expected to carry something for someone. The trick would be to make what I was carrying look very different from what I actually left for Owen, once I figured out how to get it to him. I arranged the gingerbread on a plastic Christmas plate, covered it with colored plastic wrap tied with a bow, then put that in a bakery box and wrapped a bow around that. With luck, he’d think the bakery box was my treat and wouldn’t suspect anything when he saw my gift.
I was glad I’d taken the precautions, for he definitely noticed that I was carrying something. He was still playing guessing games about my bakery box when we approached the office building. “You can trust me. I won’t tell anyone else,” he insisted.
“No offense, but the way news spreads, I’m not trusting anybody with my secrets.”
“Maybe you might have some leftovers you could share with other people?”
If the “leftovers” were the same as the treat I’d already given him, he’d definitely figure out who his secret Santa was. But he looked so eager that he was too cute to resist. I decided to bake something entirely different to give him as “leftovers” to throw him off the trail. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
His whole face lit up, so that he looked like a small child seeing his first decorated Christmas tree. If I hadn’t had my arms full with the bakery box, I might not have been able to resist hugging him. It was almost enough to make me forget about Ethan breaking my heart the day before.
The building doors swung open for us, and a man even more handsome than Owen greeted us. It took me a couple of seconds to remember that this was Rod with his illusion in place. “Oh good, I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
Owen and I exchanged a look. “You are?” Owen asked suspiciously.
After I took a glance around the lobby, I could see why. It had been transformed into one of those rope-climbing courses, with the ropes hanging suspended in midair. “You two can be the first to try it out,” Rod said.
It looked like the team-building effort for MSI had begun. Maybe paranoia and distrust weren’t so bad after all, I thought as I looked at the rope-filled maze.
“Don’t even think about it,” Owen said, and I was glad he declined before I had to.
Rod’s face fell, and for a moment I thought I could see some of his true self that lay behind the illusion. “Why not?”
“Bad shoulder, remember? I’m still not completely healed. Wouldn’t want to risk it.”
“I’m wearing a skirt today, so it probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” I hurried to add. “And maybe we ought to start smaller? I’m not sure having that many ropes around when people are already at each other’s throats is such a good idea.”
Rod winced. “You may be right. But don’t worry, I have other ideas.” He waved a hand and the rope course disappeared. Owen looked visibly relieved. I was glad to get out of anything that gave me unpleasant high school PE flashbacks, not to mention the fact that I didn’t really want to get tangled up in ropes set up by someone I still had on my list of suspects. Before Rod could come up with anything else he wanted to test on us, both Owen and I made excuses about busy days and hurried out of there.
My office turned out to be even more disconcerting than the lobby had been. It had been thoroughly decorated overnight. There was a small Christmas tree in one corner with snow delicately drifting down onto it, only to vanish before it hit the ground. Twinkling stars were suspended beneath the ceiling, with no visible cords attached.
As I stood in the doorway admiring the view, Trix came up behind me. “Do you like it?” she asked.
“Yeah. Who did it?”
She winked. “It’s a secret. How are you doing?”
“Better. In fact, I think I’m almost fully recovered.”
“Good to hear it. He’s not worth wasting tears over if he can’t appreciate you for who you are. So does that mean you’ll be joining us for girls’ night out Friday?”
“I think I will.”
“Then bring those sexy red shoes and we’ll take ’em out on the town for a good time.”
I was sure I had work to do, but first I needed to find a way to get my cookies to Owen without anyone catching on. I checked Merlin’s calendar and saw that he had a meeting with Owen that afternoon. Quite often, I was invited to those meetings, but I hadn’t been invited to this one, much to my relief. If I were there, I’d be there in my capacity as a verifier, and that was something I couldn’t do without magical immunity. But while Owen was in the meeting, I could drop the cookies off at his office.
I wasn’t entirely off the hook when it came to verification, though. Midmorning, Merlin called me to his office. “I’m afraid this is short notice,” he said, “but I have a meeting with Corporate Sales and a new potential corporate customer in a few minutes. We’re not putting together a contract yet, but I’d like to have you there, just in case. I’d insult them if I brought in a regular verifier, but having you there as my assistant and letting it be known you’re an immune might intimidate them into good behavior.”
I thought the lump that grew in my throat would choke me to death. Could I bluff my way through a meeting, even if I wasn’t called upon for official verification? “No problem,” I said, hoping I sounded perky instead of nervously shrill.
When the visitors arrived, I thought they didn’t seem particularly unusual, but then again, would I know? The potential customer could have been Satan incarnate, complete with horns, cloven hooves, and pointy tail, and if he wanted us to think he looked normal, he’d look normal to me. But he didn’t act like someone who was pulling one over on us. I’d noticed that there was a smugness about people who were doing something they thought others wouldn’t see. It was like that old T-shirt slogan: SMILE! MAKE OTHERS WONDER WHAT YOU’RE UP TO.
The Corporate Sales guy, whom I remembered was named Ryker, introduced the customer to Merlin, then Merlin introduced me. “Miss Chandler will be observing the meeting and taking notes,” he said. He put special emphasis on the word “observing,” which I supposed implied that I’d be looking at the meeting with my supposedly unique perspective. I felt a surge of guilt. I ought to have told Merlin. It wasn’t fair to let him think he had a magically immune assistant when he didn’t.
But the customer didn’t even blink. He just took his seat. The others followed his lead. I sat behind Merlin and kept my eyes peeled so hard that I thought they’d come out of their sockets. Instead of listening to the words being said, I strained to hear the meaning behind them in tone and inflection. I tuned into every nuance of body language that would tell me that someone was lying or cheating. By the end of the meeting, I had a splitting headache. I was pretty sure nothing untoward had happened, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain.
Merlin escorted his guests out, then returned to where I was gathering my no
tes. “I assume there was no skulduggery at work?” he said.
“None that I could see,” I said. On the surface, that wasn’t a lie. The lie came in not admitting how little I could actually see.
He nodded. “Good. I didn’t sense any magic use. Your mere presence may have been enough to deter it. Or we could have been dealing with a rare honest businessman.”
“Then we should probably capture him and put him in a museum,” I quipped.
“Thank you for your assistance. And your secret Santa program appears to be working already. Spirits seem to have lifted, and I’ve noticed employees actually speaking to each other again instead of eyeing each other with suspicion.”
“Great. I’m still trying to come up with other ideas.”
“We should form a task force!” He said it with great enthusiasm, and I knew he’d been reading business books again.
“Maybe,” I hedged. I hadn’t seen too many task forces accomplish much of anything other than generating a lot of memos and a few binders full of presentation slides. I said a silent prayer that Merlin wouldn’t discover PowerPoint anytime soon.
That afternoon I waited until about five minutes after Owen’s meeting with Merlin was supposed to have begun, then called Ari’s lab in practical magic. “Hi, it’s Katie,” I said when she answered. “I need to drop something off down there. Can you let me in?”
“Ooh, I bet you’ve got a secret pal,” she cooed. “But why not have your usual buddy let you in? I’m sure he’d be glad of an excuse to see you.”
I didn’t have to ask who she meant. “He’s in a meeting up here.”
“Okay, I’ll meet you at the department door in a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you! I owe you one.” After hanging up, I put my bakery box in a shopping bag I found in a desk drawer and headed out. “I have to drop something off. I’ll be back in a sec,” I explained to Trix as I passed her desk.
As I rounded the corner onto the corridor that led to R&D, I nearly ran into Gregor, who appeared to be heading in the same direction, carrying a gift bag with a reindeer printed on it. He glowered at me, which was his usual expression. “I understand you’re responsible for this,” he growled.
For a change, I was grateful for having lost my immunity. That meant I couldn’t see if he’d turned into an ogre. “Yes, and isn’t it fun?” I said brightly. His face darkened, and I imagined it was actually turning green and sprouting horns and fangs.
When I didn’t react, his face returned to its usual ruddy color. “Hmmph,” he snorted.
True to her word, Ari was waiting for me at the entrance to R&D. Gregor glanced at the doorway, then kept walking. “Just what I thought,” Ari said. “You’ve got a secret pal down here. I wonder who it could be.”
“This is the biggest department in the company. There are a lot of people it could be. Now go back to your lab, and no fair peeking.”
She fluttered alongside me until we got to her lab entrance. “Can’t you at least tell me what it is?”
“Nope. Do you not understand the concept of secret?”
She veered off to head into her lab. “I’m actually quite good at secrets,” she tossed over her shoulder. “You might be surprised at some of the secrets I’m keeping.”
I shook my head in amusement as I continued down the corridor to theoretical magic. Ari sucked at secrets. The moment she heard one, she felt compelled to share it.
Owen’s lab was empty, which made my job easier. Otherwise, I might have had to bribe Jake to secrecy. All I had to do was get into Owen’s office, pull the plate of cookies out of my box, place it on Owen’s desk, then leave with my shopping bag and box so no one would know what it was I’d left, or where.
With one last glance over my shoulder, I stepped through Owen’s doorway and barely kept my balance as an invisible force threw me backward. Only then did I remember that he’d warded his office so no one else could get in. The wards hadn’t worked on me before when I was immune to magic, but now with my immunity missing, I was kept out along with everyone else.
Instead, I left the cookies on a table in the lab, with the card with his name on it clearly visible. Now that I thought about it, that was probably a better option, anyway. If cookies appeared in his office, they would have had to come from an immune. I suspected the wards would have kept out even a magical spell to conjure up something in there.
My mission completed, I started to head out of the department, but I paused before I left the lab. If there was anyplace in this company that held the answer to what had happened with my magical immunity, it was Owen’s lab. I couldn’t get into his office where the really good books were, but there were plenty of books in the lab outside his office.
Unfortunately, as neat and precise as Owen could be, he was also wildly disorganized. I suspected he had a system that made total sense to him and he could find anything he needed within seconds, but to me it all looked like a random jumble. Acutely conscious that I had a limited amount of time, I hurried to skim the spines on the lab bookcase. I could rule out any book that didn’t appear to be in English; even if it contained the information I needed, it wouldn’t do me a lot of good if I couldn’t read it.
There was a fairly modern-looking volume that seemed to be about magical maladies. I pulled it off the shelf and opened it to the table of contents. Much to my surprise, it contained a chapter on magical immunity. Even more to my surprise, there was a Post-it note stuck on the first page of that chapter, not quite sticking out like a bookmark, but still there. Was Owen researching me—or was someone else?
Feeling more and more rushed, as I knew Merlin’s meeting was likely winding to a close, I glanced through the section headings in the chapter. Most of it was information I already knew, only written using much larger words. Finally, there was a section on the disruption of magical immunity. It was long—pages and pages’ worth—and full of even bigger words, with magical terms I didn’t know. I’d need a reference book to be able to read this book. I glanced at my watch. Merlin’s meeting with Owen would be ending at any minute. I pondered “borrowing” the book, but as paranoid as Owen was lately, he’d probably know as soon as he walked in the room that something was gone. Reluctantly, I put it back on the shelf. I’d know where it was in the future, and the relevant chapter was already marked. Maybe I could even come up with an excuse for borrowing it later.
Before I could safely sneak out of the department, Ari caught me in the hallway outside her lab. “Did you leave anything, or what?” she asked, eyeing my shopping bag and bakery box.
“Nope. I was just down here spying,” I quipped. “Thanks for letting me into the secured area.”
“Nice try, Katie, but I know you aren’t our spy.”
“And how would you know that?”
“You’re too nice. And I doubt you could keep the secret for too long. The strain would show.”
I edged past her and kept walking. “Maybe that’s part of my cover,” I shot over my shoulder as I left. It remained to be seen how right she was about my ability to keep a secret. So far, I wasn’t doing too badly at keeping everyone in the dark about my loss of magical immunity. In fact, it came as something of a surprise to me how seldom my abilities were really called upon. That made it that much easier to keep the secret, and it made me a little less afraid that I’d lose my job if anyone knew.
Then again, one more day meant it was one day closer to being permanent. A temporary effect should have passed, or so I would have hoped. Had I transferred my lack of powers to my mother instead of inheriting them from her? I needed to get back into Owen’s lab and get another look at that book.
Inspired by the decorating job done on my office, I took advantage of the fact that Owen wasn’t on the train with me on the way home to pick up some Christmas décor. Hauling shoes and clothes to change into for the girls’ night out on Friday would give me the perfect cover for bringing in the decorations right under his nose. I just had to find a good time to sneak in a
nd put them up in his lab. The ones I’d bought were cheesy enough that it might possibly look like a magical person had gone mundane on purpose.
Ari invited me down to her lab for lunch on Friday, which gave me the perfect opportunity to sneak in with the Christmas decorations. “Let me guess,” she said when she saw my bag. “More secret Santa stuff.”
“It was my idea, so I have to do a good job.”
“You know, if you’d tell me who your secret pal is, I could help you.”
“Then it wouldn’t be so secret anymore, would it?”
When she got a phone call after lunch, I took that as a good time to dash out of her lab and hurry down the hall to Owen’s lab. I nearly ran into Jake on his way out. “You just missed him,” he said. “He had to go to a meeting.”
“That’s okay. I’m only dropping some paperwork off in his office.”
“Cool.” He was already off down the hall, grooving to whatever was on his iPod, before he could think to ask why paperwork required a shopping bag. I spread out the cheesy plastic Santas and silvery tinsel on the big table in the middle of the lab so it would look like I was in the middle of decorating, then found that book again and flipped to the conveniently placed Post-it.
It was like looking for information on what to do about the common cold in a medical journal. I imagined I’d need years of study to properly understand what I was reading, but it did appear that there were ways of making a magical immune susceptible to magic. There was a whole list of chemical names, and none of them sounded familiar. It looked like once the drug was in the person’s system, they could then have spells done on them to really solidify the loss of immunity.
Well, that was great, but I wasn’t taking any drugs, not even the occasional aspirin. I hadn’t changed my routine or eaten or drunk anything new—not that I was aware of. The loss of immunity had hit before the secret Santa game started, so it couldn’t have been caused by any treat that had been left for me. Short of closing myself in a plastic bubble, there wasn’t much I could do until I figured out what was being done to me.
Once Upon Stilettos Page 21