Damsel Under Stress

by Shanna Swendson

  “Very good idea. I can’t think of a single reasonable explanation for looking—and smelling—like this.”

  When we entered Owen’s home, Loony took one whiff of him, then arched her back and hissed. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve been cheating on you with other pets,” he said wearily. Then he turned to me and said, “By this time, you know the drill. Your usual emergency clothes are in the guest room, and you’re welcome to use the shower there. I have a washer and dryer, so we can take care of your clothes before you go home, and I know a few cleaning spells that may help your coat. And I just realized, we never got around to having lunch. Want to order Chinese or a pizza or something?”

  “Anything that’s not a flambé,” I said, shuddering.

  As I rinsed the sulfurous soot out of my hair in Owen’s guest bathroom shower, I realized that at least I’d broken my usual pattern. Instead of ending up at Owen’s place cold and wet, I was hot and sooty. That wasn’t much of an improvement. I wondered if there would ever be a time when I was at Owen’s home just because he wanted me there with him and not in the aftermath of a disaster. Of course, that would mean having time with Owen without any disasters popping up, and the chances of that ever happening were beginning to look infinitesimal as long as we were in our current jobs.

  The one thing missing in Owen’s well-equipped guest bathroom was a blow dryer, but I made do by toweling my hair thoroughly, then combing it and toweling it again. I’d lathered, rinsed, and repeated enough times to get the sulfurous smell out of my hair, and I’d scrubbed a layer of skin off my face trying to get the soot off. Then I dressed in that same old sweat suit that Owen seemed to have designated as mine. In most relationships, keeping clothes at your boyfriend’s place meant things were getting serious, and it might even be a first step toward moving in. In this relationship, it would mean giving myself a better-fitting option for the next time I found myself recovering from a disaster.

  When I got downstairs, Owen was already showered and dressed. He was on the phone ordering Chinese food—in Chinese. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As many languages as he could translate, it made sense he might speak a few. I sat on the sofa and allowed myself to admire him. Even with wet hair that looked like it had been toweled halfheartedly but not combed and with his glasses on, he was still gorgeous. I waited for that usual jolt of insecurity to hit me and make me wonder what a guy who looked like that who could tame dragons and then order in Chinese would want with someone like me, but it didn’t come. He’d given me no reason to think he wanted anyone but me. Now, whether or not we could make things work was another story.

  “I’m impressed,” I said when he got off the phone.

  As I expected, he turned a fetching shade of pink. He leaned against the edge of his desk like he was trying to look casual. “Oh, yeah, well, I do speak a little, and it was easier than making sure I was understood in English.”

  “You’re full of surprises. Like whatever that was today with the dragons.”

  He brushed his damp hair out of his eyes, then frowned at the moisture left on his hand as if just noticing that his hair was still wet. “Remember when you first came to work at MSI, Rod gave you the grand tour, and when you were in my lab Jake came in with his pants shredded?”

  I nodded. I was surprised he remembered it that vividly, considering it was just a vague recollection to me. “Yeah. He was testing a spell, wasn’t he? Something to do with dogs?”

  “The spell was supposed to soothe wild animals, only it obviously didn’t work when Jake tried it on the dog that came at him. I’ve been tinkering with it since then to see how it really worked. I’m pretty sure it was a mistranslation on Jake’s part, or maybe he left something out, because it seems to have worked for me.”

  “And on something much, much bigger than a stray dog. Do they even make Milk Bones that big? Or does Purina have a Dragon Chow? I know they make just about every other kind of chow because we sold it in our store back home.”

  It wasn’t a great joke, but I’d hoped for at least a hint of a smile from him. Instead, he pounded his fist on his desk. “I can’t believe I was stupid enough to walk into that trap.”

  “Trap?”

  “Ari’s trap. You don’t think we accidentally stumbled on a nest of dragons while we were following her, do you?” He stood up and started pacing, the energy that usually bubbled just beneath his calm exterior now all at the surface. “I should have known better. What made me think that after our entire security force has spent more than a week combing the city for her, she’d happen to cross our path? And then I was dumb enough to fall for it and let her lead us into danger.”

  “I don’t know that we could have seen that coming.”

  He stopped pacing and looked at me. “But you did, didn’t you? I was the one who had to go into that tunnel. You wanted to go the other way. She had me totally fooled. I should know to always listen to you. I bet she sent an illusion for me to follow, right into her trap.”

  “I wasn’t totally sure which way she went. I’d lost sight of her. I don’t think either of us could have known, and we couldn’t have risked missing the chance to follow her to their hideout. For all we know, the hideout could have been on the other side of the dragons, and they’re using the dragons as watchdogs.”

  That calmed him somewhat. “True. I guess we’ll never really know.”

  “Unless we want to do a little more exploring in that area and see if we can find what she might have been heading to, in case it wasn’t a deliberate trap. You already have the dragons eating out of your hand. What other danger are you likely to stumble on down there?” The look on his face made me say, “Okay, scratch that. I don’t want to know. But surely it can’t be anything a pet dragon couldn’t scare away for you. You know, we could have just made a wrong turn and stumbled into the dragons on our own,” I added. “There is such a thing as coincidence.”

  He looked lost in thought while he pondered that, but before he could say anything the buzzer from the downstairs door sounded. “That’ll be lunch. I’ll be back in a second,” he said, heading for the front door. He was back not long afterward with a giant paper bag.

  “What army were you planning on feeding?” I asked.

  “I like to plan on leftovers,” he said. “And I like to make sure I have a couple of favorites I know I’ll like, plus one new thing to try.”

  We went back to the kitchen table, where we barely had room for a couple of plates among all the take-out containers. “I may even be hungry enough to eat all of this,” I said as I served myself. “Being attacked by dragons works up an appetite.”

  After we ate, we washed my clothes so I’d have something to go home in and continued discussing what we thought Ari might have been up to, Idris’s new scheme, and what our next move might be. I’d given up on any non-work-related conversation. It wasn’t like I could expect him to spend the day whispering sweet nothings into my ear when he was convinced our enemies had just tried to kill us.

  By the time I made it home, my roommates were convinced my evil boss must have made me work all day. “Even Mimi, ex-boss from hell, didn’t make you come in for a whole day on a holiday,” Marcia said as I hung up my coat, which still smelled faintly of sulfur despite Owen’s best efforts to clean it magically.

  “I haven’t been at work all day,” I said, wishing I could summon one of Owen’s blushes on command. I was too tired to pull off the bashful maiden routine at the moment. “I went out to lunch with Owen after work, and the day got away from us.”

  They both hooted, and I finally felt my face warming properly. At this point, I didn’t care what they thought I’d been doing because that had to be preferable to the truth. “Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?” Gemma said.

  “Yeah, it definitely does.”

  “Speaking of fun,” Marcia said, “what do we have planned for New Year’s Eve? Since we were apart at Christmas, we should all do something together.”

  “I’m barel
y recovering from the last holiday,” I said. “I can’t think that far ahead.” For all I knew, I’d be engaged in a major magical battle that night. When you’re part of the team trying to stop a rogue wizard, it’s hard to make advance plans.

  “Can you think as far ahead as dinner tonight?” Marcia asked. “I’m starving.”

  I wouldn’t have thought I could eat anything after all that Chinese food I’d wolfed down that afternoon, but my stomach rumbled as soon as Marcia mentioned food. “I could eat something.”

  Gemma stretched lazily on the sofa. “I’ll buy yours if you’ll go to that sandwich shop down the street and pick something up. That’s what I’m hungry for, and they don’t deliver.”

  I collected orders and money, then got my coat and headed downstairs. Only after I was a block away from our building did it dawn on me that going out and about on my own might not have been the brightest idea. I did have enemies, after all. Or was I beneath Idris’s notice now that he’d launched his company and, for all he knew, I couldn’t do him much harm? At any rate, I made sure to keep my eyes open for anything that looked out of place.

  I was still pondering angles we might be able to take against Idris as I left the sandwich shop with our dinner. I’d just rounded the corner onto our street when someone jumped out at me, shouting, “Wasn’t that exciting?”

  Thirteen

  I had to juggle for a few seconds to keep from dropping my take-out bags. Only when I was absolutely certain Gemma’s roast beef and brie sandwich wasn’t going to go splat on the pavement did I look up and recognize Ethelinda. “Would you stop that?” I shouted. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Sorry,” she said with a giggle. She still wore that hideous reject prom dress, with bits of the fur from her Mrs. Claus outfit peeking out around the neckline. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “When you don’t mean to startle someone, you don’t appear out of thin air right in front of them. And what did you think was so exciting? I was just getting sandwiches.”

  She waved her wand in a dismissive gesture. “I wasn’t referring to the sandwiches. I was talking about the dragons.”

  “You knew about the dragons?”

  “I hear about things. There’s very little that happens to you that I don’t find out about.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure I was crazy about that idea. There were reasons why I’d never auditioned to be on reality TV. I didn’t like the idea of being watched. “Well, ‘exciting’ isn’t quite the word I’d use to describe the dragons.”

  “Yes, but surviving an encounter with dragons and being rescued by such a brave young man must have been exciting.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But trust me, it doesn’t work out that way in real life.” It occurred to me then that Owen might have been right about the dragons being a trap. Ethelinda herself might have set it, not to put us in danger but because a hero rescuing a damsel in distress from a dragon was such a staple of romantic fantasy sagas. But surely she couldn’t be that stupid. If she knew my entire relationship history and all that stuff about our destiny, she had to know what our work entailed and that dragons were pretty darn dangerous. It would be awfully hard to play matchmaker to a couple of piles of cinders. “You wouldn’t have happened to arrange our meeting with the dragons, would you?” I asked.

  “Moi?” She batted her eyelashes vigorously, as though she was both hurt and offended by my accusation, but she didn’t exactly deny it. “Rescuing a maiden from a dragon is a sure way to generate romance. It’s in all the stories. I can’t begin to count the number of couples I’ve known who met that way. But that doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it.”

  “You were there. I saw you.”

  “I was merely keeping an eye on my client. You were hard to keep up with when you were chasing your friend that way.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced of her innocence, but I could tell arguing would do no good. “Well, for the record, there’s nothing romantic about dragons. They’re ugly, loud, and smelly. And Owen thought someone was trying to lead us into a trap to kill us, so he spent the rest of the day wondering what our enemies might be up to. He probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d swooned into his arms.”

  “You didn’t swoon into his arms?” For once, she sounded unsure.

  “No. I’m not really the swooning type. I’m also not very good at being a damsel in distress. I don’t like being rescued. I’d rather rescue myself. We already have a pretty skewed balance of power—literally—in this relationship. Him always having to rescue me doesn’t help matters.”

  “It wasn’t romantic, then?”

  “No!” For once, I didn’t play the good Southern girl and apologize when she looked hurt. I repositioned my bags and resumed walking toward home, making her flutter to keep up with me. “If you did have anything to do with it, or if you were thinking of doing something like that, please give it a rest. You’re really not doing me a lot of favors in the romance department. Not that I recall asking you for any favors in the romance department, beyond one little, tiny bit of information, which you didn’t have.”

  “So falling through the ice didn’t give him the chance to warm you up?”

  “Aha! I knew that was you! Yeah, there was some warming up and even snuggling, but it also ruined our date just when it was getting romantic. Who knows what might have happened if you’d let things play out naturally?”

  “You think I had something to do with that? I’d never do anything to cause you harm.”

  She looked so hurt that I almost relented. “Look,” I said, a little more gently, “things are complicated for us right now because of our work, so when something bad happens to us, neither of us is likely to think about romance as we rescue or comfort each other. Instead, we think that someone’s out to get us, so we worry, which isn’t too romantic, and since he’s very, very dedicated to his work, he tends to go right into work mode to try to solve the problem, and that totally kills the romance.”

  She perked up. “Oh. Then I shall have to see what I can do to help you with that.”

  “No! You don’t have to do anything!” I called out, but she disappeared before I got the “no” out. I could only begin to imagine what her next tactic might be if she was actually behind all the things that had happened to us lately.

  The next morning, Kim reported bright and early to Owen’s lab to get her assignment from him. Being sent out into the field undercover must have been the most excitement she’d had in a long time. Her sallow skin almost had a healthy flush to it and she’d lost that pinched look around her mouth. Maybe all she really wanted was to feel needed and important. Or maybe she was just excited about getting that much more of a grasp on my job.

  While we waited for her to return with the spells, Owen buried himself in a book that was almost bigger than he was, and I searched the Internet for advertising case studies that might have some bearing on our situation. When Kim had been gone an hour, Owen gave up on reading and started pacing. He seemed on the verge of calling out the cavalry when she finally returned with two large Spellworks shopping bags.

  “He’s serious if he has good shopping bags,” I said as Owen took them from her. They were almost on a par with what you’d find at a high-end boutique, with a shiny logo on the sides and ribbon handles.

  “They are good shopping bags, aren’t they?” Kim said. “Do you mind if I keep one when you’re done with them?”

  “We’ll see,” Owen said distractedly.

  “Okay, just let me know if you need anything else. I’m only a phone call away.” It was then that I realized her flushed look hadn’t been excitement. It had been makeup. She’d dolled herself up to meet with Owen. She’d moved in on my job, and now was she moving in on my man? Fortunately, Owen was too focused on the problem at hand to even notice her or her attempts at fluttering eyelashes. There were times when his focus on work and obliviousness about other things worked in my favor.

  W
e spent the rest of the day with me reading the spells out loud while Owen read over my shoulder so we could compare what he saw to what I saw. That was more than a bit distracting, and if Jake hadn’t been hovering to see what we’d found, I might not have been able to stop myself from tackling Owen and throwing him down on one of the lab tables. After clearing it of clutter first, of course.

  When I’d read at least six spells and had to take a break because my throat was raw, Owen buried his face in his hands with a groan. “We are in huge trouble,” he declared.

  “Why? Is there something dark hidden in there?”

  He shook his head. “No. There’s nothing veiled that I can tell. They’re all perfectly legitimate, straightforward spells. Not particularly good ones, granted. They take far more energy than necessary to do that kind of work, and I don’t see these spells as all that valuable for day-today life. But there’s no reason here for us to stop him or go after him. I can’t believe he’s really trying to compete with us directly.”

  “Are we sure he is? Maybe he’s just trying to establish credibility so his company will be more acceptable when he wants to introduce something else.”

  He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. “You know, you could be right. He was able to get to the people who’d be looking for darker spells with his old way of selling through less reputable outlets, but he’d never gain any kind of market share if he went into business on this scale selling darker stuff. But this way, he gets customers, then he has a group of people who might be open to the next round of spells he offers.”

  “It’s like boiling a frog,” I said, nodding.

  “What?”

  “Well, supposedly you can’t throw a frog into a pot of boiling water because it’ll jump right out. But if you put it in a pot of cold water and gradually turn up the heat, it’ll be boiling before it knows it needs to escape. Not that I’ve tried this myself, of course.”