Enchanted, Inc.

by Shanna Swendson

  I left the dungeon and headed toward the turret. Merlin’s receptionist looked up from her work as I reached the top of the stairs. “Go right in, he’s expecting you,” she said. I wondered just how much he knew, and how he knew it. The explanation could be as simple as Ralph calling ahead, but just as I was pretty sure Owen didn’t stand around all morning on the subway platform, waiting for me, I was pretty sure Merlin didn’t need a phone call.

  He greeted me as soon as I stepped through the doors. “Katie! How are you?” He brushed my hair away from my face and studied my bruise. “That’s ugly, but it’s already on the mend. Please, have a seat. I was just making some tea. Would you care for some?”

  “Yes, please,” I said as I took a seat on the sofa and waited for the cup to appear in my hands. Then I noticed him standing over by a counter tucked into a corner of the office, fussing with an electric teakettle. He was really making tea.

  As he worked he talked. “Tea is quite a remarkable beverage. We had nothing like it in my day, as the British had barely journeyed beyond our own kingdom at the time. We had to settle for herbal infusions. Every day I seem to discover something new.”

  “I imagine you do.” I felt almost overwhelmed when I considered what he must be going through. His intellectual curiosity was probably what kept him sane.

  “Milk or lemon?”

  “Milk, please.”

  He brought two cups and a sugar bowl over on a tray. “There, now we can talk.”

  I handed him the revised packaging design. “What do you think?”

  He studied it carefully, then handed it back to me with a sad smile. “It does seem to say what we want it to, but I must confess I don’t know enough to know if this is good or not.”

  “It’s good, really.”

  “Then by all means, please carry out your plan.”

  “I’ll let Ralph know, and then apparently everything will be changed automatically. The sales department is also gearing up to make a big splash with their next release, which is scheduled this week.”

  “Good, good.” Then he looked grave. “Do you think this will save us?”

  I looked down at the mock-up packaging I held. “I don’t know. I don’t think it can hurt. The object does seem to be to shrink the impact your competitor can have just long enough to come up with a way of fighting him. This may do it.”

  “Then I am most grateful.” He chuckled. “Here they brought an ancient sorcerer out of hibernation, and our problems are solved by a clever girl without an ounce of magic in her.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything about solving this. That part’s up to you guys.” I took a sip of my tea and thought for a moment, then plunged ahead with the question I wanted to ask. “How bad is this Idris guy, anyway?”

  “Phelan Idris is a great danger, and not just because he’s angry at us. He’s dangerous because he believes in using his power to its fullest extent, without regard for the consequences and with no thought for the people who might get in his way. He would have left eventually, for he chafed under our rules, but we sent him away angry.”

  “And everyone’s in danger, not just magical people?”

  “I’d say the nonmagical people are in greater danger, not because he has any particular enmity toward them, but because they lack the resources to protect themselves.”

  “And is he really all that powerful?”

  “I don’t think he can counter the combined might of our best people. But in order to counter a spell, one must first understand it. Unfortunately, understanding it may involve some risk, as would testing any countermeasures we might devise.”

  “You’d have to be on the receiving end of it,” I guessed.

  “Or very nearby.”

  I didn’t like to think about that. It meant Owen was out looking to be hit by one of those spells, and as powerful as I knew him to be, I still thought of him as that sweet, shy, harmless-seeming guy. “All this”—I indicated the package—“may just rile him up for you.”

  “Then your plan will have unexpected benefits.” He rose from the sofa. “Now, what about your offer to go out to lunch with me and show me the area?”

  “It’s still good. I just need to give Ralph the go-ahead on the packaging.”

  “We’ll go see him together. Is there anything I’ll need with me?”

  “It’s a bit nippy, so you may need your jacket. And you’ll need money.” I certainly couldn’t afford to buy lunch for both of us at too many places around here.

  He took his jacket from a coat tree, then went into the outer office and asked his assistant for some of the local currency. He waited in the hallway outside the verification department while I grabbed my jacket and purse, then we went down to the basement together. Ralph jumped to attention when he saw the big boss enter his den.

  “Very good work, son. Please implement it immediately,” Merlin said.

  “Yes, sir, boss, right away.”

  As we left the building I said, “I haven’t really explored this part of town, other than walking through it, but I think there are some restaurants over on Broadway.”

  “Lead on, then. You’re more of an expert than I am.” He held his arm out for me to take as we walked toward Park Row. Anyone we passed on the streets probably thought I was out for a stroll with my grandfather.

  In a way, Merlin did remind me of my long-dead granddad. My real grandfather had been a Texas farmer, and not very much like a Dark Ages wizard, but both of them had the same curiosity and good humor. If they’d met, they probably would have been friends.

  Along Park Row was a string of computer, music, and electronics stores. Merlin slowed to look through the windows. I imagined this stuff would be fascinating for someone like him. “Do you mind if we go inside?” he asked.

  “Not at all.”

  The store was crowded with lunchtime browsers. Merlin headed straight to the DVD section, which astonished me. I wouldn’t have thought he’d know where to go in a store like this. “Do you have a DVD player?” I asked him.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Of course. Otherwise, my evenings would be lonely. I find it a fascinating way to learn about this place and time. Owen taught me how to operate it and loaned me some films about New York.”

  I moved closer to him and dropped my voice so the other shoppers couldn’t hear me. “You do know it’s not real, the stuff on the DVDs, right? Unless it’s a documentary. Otherwise, it’s fake, with actors and scripts.”

  “I came to that conclusion when I saw the one about the giant gorilla,” he said dryly.

  “Yeah, that would tend to do it.”

  He apparently found whatever he was looking for. “Ah, yes, this is the one.”

  I leaned over his shoulder to see what he was holding. “Camelot?”

  “Yes. I’m curious as to how the story has been portrayed.”

  “It’s a musical. The characters burst into song from time to time.”

  “Then that is certainly different from the actual events.” He smiled. “What kinds of songs does a certain wizard sing?”

  I hadn’t seen Camelot since the drama club put on a production when I was in high school. “I don’t think you—I mean, Merlin, has any songs. It’s mostly about what happens to Arthur after Merlin goes away.”

  “I’ve read the historical accounts, of course. Very sad.”

  I guided him to the checkout counter, but just as we got there, a teenager in a coat way too heavy for the temperature stepped forward and pulled out a gun. “Gimme whatever you got in the cash register,” he said to the clerk.

  The clerk shrieked and stepped backward, her hands in the air. I clapped my hands over my mouth to stifle my own scream. The last thing I needed was for the robber to notice me. All I had in my purse that he might want was about ten dollars, my MetroCard, and a credit card with a laughably low spending limit, but to me that was a lot to lose. Not to mention all that nice blood I had coursing through my body, that I really wanted to stay inside my bod
y. What if this guy didn’t want to leave any witnesses? That was the way it always went in the movies, the robber freaking out and shooting everyone in sight so no one could identify him. Or what if he took us all hostage and this turned into an all-day standoff?

  The really scary thing was that my mother was right about something. She’d warned me about how I was sure to be mugged and robbed in the big city, and here I was, being robbed. Okay, so technically I wasn’t the one being robbed, but there was a man with a gun not five feet away from me. Forget the fight or flight response. I was frozen to the floor. All I knew was that I didn’t want to die. I needed to live long enough to have something vaguely interesting to look at when my life passed before my eyes.

  Then I remembered that I wasn’t alone. I was with one of the most powerful wizards in all history. A teenage thug robber wasn’t going to take out Merlin. That made me feel marginally better. I glanced at Merlin to see what he would do, but he didn’t look at all alarmed, which made me nervous again. Surely all those movies he’d watched would have shown him that a gun was a weapon. Could you even make a movie in the United States that didn’t have a gun in it? But then I noticed that nobody had moved—not the clerk, not the robber, not anyone else in the store. It was like time had stopped, and Merlin and I were the only ones still moving.

  “Neat trick,” I said, letting the breath I’d been holding out in a long sigh. “Now what?”

  “You should summon emergency help, and I’ll make sure no one can be harmed.”

  I went to the phone next to the cash register and dialed 911. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Merlin take the thug’s gun, empty it of bullets, then put the gun back in the thug’s hand. On the other end of the phone line, a recorded voice told me to please stay on the line if this was an emergency. “Put the phone in the clerk’s hand,” Merlin instructed me. I did as he said. “Now, we should go. I have legal papers establishing my residence here, but it’s best that I not be questioned by the police.”

  That seemed like a good idea to me. I wasn’t sure how long he could sustain whatever cover he’d established before he said something that would get him locked up for psychological evaluation. We headed for the door, but before we got there I took the Camelot DVD out of his hand. “You can’t take this out without paying.”

  “Ah, good point. I shall have to come back here another time.”

  I put the DVD on a nearby display, then hurried to catch up with Merlin, who was holding the door. As the door closed behind us the store came back to life. I thought I heard the clerk say, “We’re being robbed.”

  “We’re near City Hall, so I’m sure there’ll be police here soon,” I said, more to make myself feel better than to reassure Merlin. Then a thought crossed my mind and I gasped. “What if they have security cameras? It’ll show up on tape that we were there, that we tinkered with the scene, and then that we left before the cops got there.”

  “Don’t worry, that was taken care of as part of my spell.”

  “You know about security cameras?”

  “I know about a great many things. My focus in the first few months after I was brought back was intensive study of your world. Now, some lunch would be nice, don’t you think?”

  Merlin spotted a pizza stand on a side street and said, “I want to try this food. I’ve seen it in the movies, and it looks interesting.” So, we got a couple of slices to go and took them to a nearby plaza to sit and eat. He struggled with the strings of mozzarella that came off his pizza, and it became easier once more to think of him as a kindly old man who was a little out of his element, not as someone who could freeze the world around him.

  We had just finished lunch when Sam swooped in and settled onto a nearby bench. “Good, I found you,” he said, sounding about as out-of-breath as a stone creature could.

  “What is it, Sam?” Merlin asked.

  “You need to get back to the office right away, boss.”

  I glanced around to see if any of the other people in the park were staring at us. Even though I knew there was magic in place to keep people from seeing Sam or us interacting with Sam, it still felt funny to talk to a gargoyle in public.

  But everyone continued eating and talking, paying us very little attention as we got up and walked away, Sam flying just ahead of us.

  “Sam, what’s going on?” I asked. I couldn’t help but worry. Maybe I was in trouble for taking Merlin outside.

  “They got their hands on one of that guy’s spells. Palmer’s about to check it out. He thought you’d want to be there, boss. Katie-bug, too.” He glanced over his shoulder with a smirk. “Apparently, we need a professional opinion on the marketing and packaging. And we need to make sure there’s nothing hidden in it.” It was nice to have an excuse to tag along without having to come up with one on my own.

  Merlin moved pretty quickly for a man more than a thousand years old. In fact, I was the one lagging behind him and Sam. With his wings, Sam had an unfair advantage. We reached the building, and Sam took his usual post on the awning. Merlin and I went inside and straight to the R&D department.

  Owen and Jake—this time without a shredded pants leg—were in Owen’s lab, both their heads bent over something that lay between them on a table. They looked up as we entered. “Mr. Mervyn, Katie,” Owen greeted us.

  “So, this is it,” Merlin said, leaning over to look at the booklet on the table.

  “Yeah, found it in that hole-in-the-wall dive charm-and-record shop in the East Village,” Jake said.

  “I’m afraid to ask what he was doing there during office hours,” Owen said dryly. I thought the fact that Jake was wearing a New York Dolls T-shirt was a pretty good clue, but Owen didn’t strike me as a punk fan. I only knew because of a college roommate who was the reason I ended up moving off campus with Marcia, Gemma, and Connie, which eventually led to me moving to New York. I owed a lot to the punk movement.

  Merlin made “Hmmm” sounds as he flipped through the spell book. “Well, then,” he said as he closed it and handed it to me. “What do you think, Katie?”

  I assumed he meant the packaging, as I couldn’t tell him the first thing about magic. I turned it over in my hands. “Well, for starters, this Idris guy doesn’t have a marketing department. He must have done this with his home computer and an ink-jet printer.” It didn’t even look like he was trying to market his products. Then again, the contents would sell itself to the kind of person who’d be interested in this sort of thing.

  “Let others do your dirty work for you,” the package said on the front in big letters. In another font, in smaller letters, it added, “Use unsuspecting normals as your personal slaves. They won’t even remember what they’ve done for you. Always have an alibi, for you were nowhere near.”

  I looked at the others and smirked. “You have to admit, they have a compelling message. You don’t need a lot of flash when you’ve got a proposition like that.” Although I tried to keep my tone flippant, the thought of it sent chills down my spine. I knew I was safe because I was immune, but there were too many people I cared about who weren’t immune. “A personal slave sounds pretty appealing. I could get someone to do my laundry and wash the dishes.”

  “Or carry out a robbery while you were somewhere else, with plenty of witnesses to verify your alibi,” Owen remarked.

  That made me think of the robbery Merlin had just foiled. I wondered if that thug was operating under his own will or someone else’s. “That, too.” The crime implications alone were staggering. I imagined a rash of bank robberies carried out by people who were somewhere else at the time. “I’m not sure our marketing campaign can beat this,” I said. “If someone’s interested in this kind of thing, they won’t care about all that quality and testing stuff.”

  “But your marketing may keep many stores from stocking these spells,” Owen said, not looking directly at me. I mentally kicked myself for not having thought of that for myself. I was supposed to be the marketing expert here, even if Owen was an all-pu
rpose genius.

  “That’s true,” Jake added. “This was the first one I found, and that shop isn’t too picky.”

  “We’ll just have to keep an eye on the stores where most people shop. Maybe we should do a brochure and really hit the stores with our next big push,” I said.

  “Good idea,” Merlin said, and I got the impression he actually knew what I was talking about. Another genius. I was surrounded by them.

  “Our best bet is to make these things as hard as possible to find,” I added, trying to make myself sound more authoritative than I felt.

  “What do you think of the spell itself?” Merlin asked Owen.

  “It’s along the lines of what he was working on when he was here. His project started as a fairly simple influence spell, one that can make anyone more likable. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, but Gregor thought there was a real market for it, and it wouldn’t cause any real harm because there would be limits built in. But Phelan took it beyond that, and that’s when we put an end to it. I don’t know if he ever got it to work. I suppose we’ll have to find out.”

  Jake groaned. “Don’t make me do anything stupid or embarrassing, okay?”

  “No, you don’t make me do anything embarrassing.” At Jake’s blank, shocked look Owen added, “I need to feel the effects of the spell to get a better sense of what I’ll have to come up with to counter it.”

  Jake grinned, showing crooked teeth in his freckled face. He looked like Jimmy Olsen in a lab coat and a punk rock T-shirt. “Sure thing, boss.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Owen said. “Remember, even if I’m not supposed to remember what you made me do, I have witnesses.”

  “Geeze, take all the fun out of it. I was only going to make you cluck like a chicken.”

  Owen looked alarmed. “No chickens!” I imagined it was difficult for someone like him to put himself in such a helpless role. It didn’t help matters that he was so easily embarrassed. He blushed when he spoke to someone. I couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if someone made him cluck like a chicken or take his clothes off. “First, though, we’d better make sure there’s nothing hidden in there. Katie?”