Damsel Under Stress

by Shanna Swendson

  When I was ready to go, Owen picked up my bag without a word, and we walked in silence from my building to his town house. Loony was waiting for him inside his front door, but instead of rubbing against my ankles in greeting as she usually did after first welcoming Owen, she hissed at me and arched her back. “Eluned!” Owen scolded. I supposed that using her real name instead of her nickname was the cat equivalent of when my mom called me Kathleen Elizabeth.

  “It’s okay,” I said wearily. “She’s probably confused. They say animals pick up different kinds of vibes and scents about people, and I must feel strange to her.” I nodded my head toward the stairs. “The usual guest room?”

  “Yeah. Make yourself at home.”

  While I climbed the stairs, he picked up his cat and took her back toward the kitchen. Up in the guest room, I changed out of my work clothes and into something more comfortable, but not the old sweat suit of his that still lay on the guest bed. As oddly strained as things currently were between us, it might have been weird to wear his clothes.

  I got back downstairs to find that he’d removed his suit coat and tie, but otherwise was still wearing his work clothes. Loony lapped at her water in the far corner of the kitchen. She gave me the evil eye, then returned to her water. Owen poured boiling water into a teapot. “I thought I’d make some tea,” he said. “That was always Gloria’s cure for everything.”

  “I wish it could cure this,” I said with a wistful sigh, leaning against the counter. “I’m sorry about all this.”

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, not turning to look at me. All I could see was his back. His shoulders looked stiff and tense. I wanted desperately to rub his back to get him to relax, but I doubted that would go over very well. It would only make him more tense.

  “Well, none of this would have happened if I hadn’t gone against your objections about removing my immunity so I could check out how the ads were veiled.”

  Still with his back to me, and his shoulders stiffer than ever, he said, “You didn’t overrule me. Mr. Mervyn did, and he was right to do so. We needed that information, and can you imagine what a disaster it might have been if this had happened to another immune, one who didn’t know how to recognize when something was wrong, and who didn’t have the kind of mental control you’ve got?” He shook his head. “My objection was for purely personal reasons, not for the greater good.”

  “It was my idea to go to the party. I should have known that wasn’t the smartest thing to do in the state I was in.”

  “And I was with you at the party, which means I was with you when it happened. I let this happen right under my nose.” He laughed bitterly as he lifted the teaball from the teapot. “And I’m supposed to be the super-brilliant wizard.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. Not that I totally agreed with him. I wasn’t sure how we could have prevented this, short of locking me in a tower where visitors had to climb up my hair to get inside and no magic could reach me, but I knew he wasn’t ready to hear that. He’d rather take the blame than admit that there were things he couldn’t control, no matter how powerful he was.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the fairy godmother?” he asked after a while, his voice cool and distant.

  I shrugged, even though he wasn’t looking at me to see the gesture. “I didn’t think it was important.”

  He finally turned around to face me. “Not important? When all those things were happening that could have got you—and sometimes us—killed, and I was trying to figure out how Idris was involved? Don’t you think it would have helped me to know everything that was going on?”

  I felt about the size Ari must have shrunk to when she was put in my head. “I thought I had it all under control. I kept telling her I didn’t want her help, and I was never sure she was actually behind that stuff.” I could feel my face growing warmer as I admitted, “And I didn’t want you to think I was using a fairy godmother to get you. I was afraid that would make me look pathetic and desperate.”

  “I might have understood that. I know how those things work and that you’d have very little control if a fairy godmother did decide to intervene in your life. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t trust me enough to tell me. It affected me, too, you know.”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with me not trusting you,” I protested, but he’d already turned his back to me again. He arranged the teapot, a couple of cups, a creamer and sugar bowl, and a small plate of cookies onto a tray in a way that would have made Gloria proud. She’d probably drilled him for hours, just for an occasion such as this. I followed him to the living room and took a seat at the far end of the sofa. He poured tea for both of us, fixing mine the way I liked it without having to ask. Then he sat at the other end of the sofa.

  The silence between us grew almost unbearable. “Are you mad at me?” I finally blurted. “I know I must have done and said some awful things, but that wasn’t me. And I’m sorry about not telling you about the fairy godmother. I didn’t think it mattered, and I really didn’t want to worry you when you had so much else to worry about.”

  “I was more hurt and confused than mad. I knew something had to be wrong.”

  “Would it have killed you to say something to that effect? I spent the first day thinking my roommates were torturing me by telling me lies about what I’d done, and then when I finally figured it out, I thought everyone would hate me. That is the rumor going around the company, by the way. I think there’s an office pool on how fast you’ll dump me.”

  “I wasn’t planning to dump you.” He got a look in his eye that on anyone else would have looked almost roguish, but he couldn’t quite carry off even the hint of naughtiness. His furious blush counteracted the glint in his eye. “I actually found some of your suggestions rather intriguing.”

  I noticed, though, that he didn’t move any closer to me.

  Loony joined us, hissing at me in passing, then curled up against Owen’s leg and glared at me as if to warn me away from him. That was the last straw. Ari had tried to sabotage me with my roommates, the entire company, and with Owen, but making animals dislike me was too much, in spite of what I’d said earlier about understanding it. I wished for a moment that I could give Loony a good reason for hating me.

  A split second later, she jumped up with a sharp yowl, took a flying leap off the sofa, and darted out of the room. “There goes psycho cat,” Owen said, watching the doorway where she’d disappeared. “Sometimes I think this house is haunted, the way she reacts to things even I don’t sense or see.”

  “Oh, cats do that kind of thing, for no good reason,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. I was not going to admit to Owen that I’d just zapped his cat. It looked like I still had access to magical powers, and I could see where having that kind of power offered some unpleasant temptations.

  We passed the rest of the day without much interaction. He dug back into his magic books while I stared at my laptop screen and pretended to work on a report. I was just starting to think it might be late enough for me to get away with going to bed when Owen’s doorbell rang. He got up and returned a moment later with Rod.

  Rod looked stricken. There was no other way to describe the mingling of horror and worry on his face. “What is it?” I asked him.

  “It’s Marcia,” he said.

  Twenty

  “W hat about Marcia?” I asked, my heart already hammering in my chest before I even heard what happened. People tended not to look or sound like he did when they had good news.

  Rod paced in front of the fireplace, talking as he walked. “I called her at the office this afternoon to ask her out. Her receptionist said she wasn’t in, and they didn’t know where she was or when she’d be back. She’d gone out to lunch and hadn’t returned. Then I tried her at your place, but there was no answer, and I tried her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. I called your place again a little while ago, and your other roommate said she wasn’t home yet. She sounded worried. I
take it this is uncharacteristic of Marcia?”

  “It’s certainly uncharacteristic of you,” Owen muttered. “You didn’t just move on to the next candidate?”

  Rod scowled at him. “I like her, okay? I want to go out with her, not with the next person on my list. Not that there is anyone else on the list right now.”

  “Yes, it is uncharacteristic of her,” I said, stepping in before they could start squabbling. They weren’t kidding when they said they were like brothers. “She’s obsessive about keeping us posted on where she is and when she’ll be somewhere, and if you leave her a message, she’ll return your call the moment she gets it. Do you think she’s been caught up in all this?”

  Rod shrugged. He looked utterly miserable. “I don’t know, but isn’t it suspicious that she disappeared while we’ve got Ari?” It seemed like word of what was going on had already spread within the company.

  A horrible thought struck me. “It may not have anything to do with Ari. Philip and Ethan were supposed to have a meeting with Sylvia Meredith today, and that was when they were going to tell her that Philip planned to press his claim to get his company back. She may have found out that Philip was dating one of my roommates—Ari knew that, which means Idris might have known—but they got the wrong roommate.”

  “I’ll call Ethan,” Owen said, heading over to his desk.

  Before long, it seemed like we had half the magical people I knew gathered in Owen’s dining room, which made Owen visibly uncomfortable. He’d spent the time after he made the necessary phone calls frantically moving his piles of junk around. I wasn’t sure whether he was cleaning up for company or making sure people wouldn’t accidentally rearrange anything.

  Merlin, Philip, Ethan, Rod, Owen, and I gathered around Owen’s unusually bare dining table over Chinese food to strategize. In spite of the food piled in front of us, none of us felt much like eating. Philip’s lips were pressed into a thin, white line. Rod had lost even the pretense of cool. Owen paced the room, and even Merlin looked unusually tense. Ethan was the only one who seemed relatively at ease. The possibility of excitement was probably revving his engine.

  “I realize that you value your friend,” Merlin said to me once the situation had been outlined, “but we cannot allow Mr. Vandermeer to give up his claim. That appears to be the primary funding source for the Spellworks operation, so we must have it in less dangerous hands.”

  “Which is why they grabbed her in the first place,” Ethan said. “It’s an ironclad case. If it weren’t for the frog factor, I bet I could even get a ruling in our favor from a regular judge. In a magical court, she doesn’t stand a chance. She panicked, and then she resorted to kidnapping.”

  “You’re not going to let them kill Marcia,” Rod said, his voice cracking with emotion. He really must have liked her, I realized. Maybe he had finally met his match. I felt bad that I wasn’t the one arguing for saving my friend, but I knew as well as anyone did what was at stake.

  But then I realized something. “Wait a second—we’ve got our own hostage.” They all turned to me, looking blank. I tapped my forehead. “Remember my fairy parasite? We’ve got something we can exchange.”

  “But do they care enough about Ari to be willing to exchange her?” Philip asked.

  “They sprang her from our custody in the first place,” I reminded them all, “and it didn’t even seem like Idris knew about it, so his bosses must have done it, probably to keep her from talking. They must still be worried about what she might know and blab about, and if they aren’t willing to free her, you know she’ll be angry enough to talk.”

  Owen stopped pacing and leaned forward, resting his arms against the back of a dining chair. “She might also be good bait to help us catch someone who would be a valuable hostage for the higher-ups.”

  I knew exactly where he was going with that. “Yeah, Idris cares about her on some level, I think. We might be able to catch him by letting him know we have Ari, and then we can use him to free Marcia. If Ari knows enough to do damage, imagine what Idris could do, and he is their front man in all this. If they lost him, they’d at least have to make new ads.”

  “He is most likely the weak link in the chain,” Merlin said thoughtfully. “We may not be able to determine who is ultimately directing this endeavor, but if we have Mr. Idris, we might be able to get information, or we could force them to make a trade if they worry he’ll give information.”

  “Okay, it looks like we’re agreed that we’ll use Ari as leverage to eventually get Marcia back without Philip having to give up his claim,” Ethan said. “But we’ll need to find a few more ways to stack the deck in our favor.”

  “Meeting them in the right place could help,” Owen said. “There are some abandoned railway tunnels under Grand Central that should be ideal. It’s possible that they have some base of operations near there, so they’ll think it’s their territory, but we have other advantages.”

  Again, I was sure I knew where he was going. Being able to read him wasn’t always reassuring, I was learning. “Oh no,” I moaned. “Not that. Are you sure that’s a good idea? It might not still be safe.”

  “It’s safe.” He didn’t quite look me in the eye when he said it.

  “You’ve gone back to check on them, haven’t you?”

  He turned red. “I felt bad about leaving them tame and then abandoning them.”

  “Owen, they’ll find a way to follow you home someday, and your neighbors won’t be happy about that.”

  “Would you mind filling the rest of us in?” Ethan asked.

  “Dragons,” I said. “We found a nest in those tunnels, and the dragon whisperer here seems to have made pets out of them.”

  “He’s always been that way,” Rod said. “You should have seen the things that followed him home when he was a kid.”

  “I don’t exactly have them tamed,” Owen said, still blushing, “but I think they will do what I ask, and I can make sure nobody gets away from there without my say-so. It gives us some benefit having an extra force on our side.”

  “Okay,” Ethan said with a nod. “Now, how do we want to do the exchanges, in what order? Choreographing this thing should be interesting.”

  “We do them both at the same time,” Owen said. “But they don’t have to know they’re all there. Rod, you’re our master of illusion. You can keep them from seeing each other until we’re all ready.”

  They went on strategizing, but my ever-increasing headache made it hard for me to concentrate. It sounded like my main role in all this was to stay out of the way with Ari in my brain until they absolutely needed me to prove we had her. I picked at the food on my plate, but it had gone cold. Then I remembered that I could temporarily do magic, so I concentrated on reheating my dinner. When I put a forkful of food in my mouth, it scorched my tongue. It seemed that there was a lot to learn in order to have the precise control Owen and the others had.

  Finally, the others settled on the complex choreography of who would do what and when. All that was left was to set it up and see if the bad guys were willing to play along. “Mr. Wainwright,” Merlin said to Ethan, “you will contact Miss Meredith in the morning to arrange that exchange. Make it sound like your client is planning to give in to her demands, but say nothing that sounds like it might be a pledge. Meanwhile, I will go to the Spellworks store and give them the message for Mr. Idris. Someone at the store has to know how to contact him, and under the circumstances, I’m sure they’ll do so.”

  I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall for Merlin’s visit to the store. Imagine being a magic store clerk and having the real Merlin walk into your store. It would be like Elvis walking into a neighborhood record store.

  “What about Gemma?” I asked as the thought occurred to me. “If they figure out they have the wrong person, she could be in danger.”

  “We already have her guarded,” Merlin said.

  “She’ll be worried sick, though. She’s probably called the police by now.”

&n
bsp; “Why shouldn’t she call the police?” Rod asked, his voice and face hard and grim. “Marcia is in danger.”

  “I have one more question,” I said, raising my hand. “When do we deal with Ari?”

  “After everything is secured, we will get you to a safe place where we know we can retain custody of her, and then we will summon your fairy godmother to do the spell,” Merlin said. I tried not to groan at imagining any more time spent with Ari in my head.

  Once everyone had synchronized their watches and verified their parts in the plan, the others went home. I helped Owen clear away the remains of the mostly uneaten Chinese food. “Do you think we have a prayer of making this work?” I asked.

  “We’ll find out tomorrow. I’m sorry your friends have been caught up in this.” His voice had warmed a little toward me since our earlier conversation, but I still felt a bit of a chill.

  “It’s Ari’s fault, really,” I said, forcing a light tone into my voice in an attempt to ease the awkwardness. “She was the one who broke the spell on Philip in the first place, which left him wandering the park for Gemma to find when she decided jogging in the park on Saturday mornings was a good way to meet men.”

  “I assure you, I will do everything in my power to make sure your friend is returned safely.” He said it like he meant it as a solemn vow, and I knew his power was considerable enough that he wasn’t swearing anything lightly.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. He just nodded in response. I could have really used a hug, but he didn’t look like he was in the mood, and I could practically feel the barrier between us.

  Before we headed to bed, he gave me the immunity potion and the fairy sedative. I’d have to go through magical detox when all this was over, given the number of magical drugs I was taking.

  I wasn’t sure if it was the potions or my overall weariness, but I slept hard and woke feeling heavy and lethargic. When I’d showered and dressed, I found Owen in the kitchen, making breakfast. As soon as he noticed my presence, he gestured to the two glasses that sat on the table. “Ah, yes, the morning doses,” I said.