Enchanted, Inc. (Enchanted Inc #1)

by Shanna Swendson

  Philip’s friends were probably starting to hibernate—or whatever it is frogs do—for the winter. Or else they were all in retirement homes, if they dated from his prefrog days. “Actually, I may have an idea,” I said, figuring this was as good an opening as I was likely to get. “Marce, you aren’t going to call that Ethan guy you were matched up with a while back, are you?”

  She frowned. “Which one was he?”

  “Intellectual property attorney, tall, glasses, brainy. It was the night all of us went out with Connie and Jim.”

  She made a face. “Him? You want to go out with him?”

  “I take that to mean that you wouldn’t mind if I did.”

  “He’s all yours, honey.”

  Gemma beamed. “So, you want me to call Jim and have him tell Ethan to call you if he’s interested?”

  “Yes, please. He seemed nice.” This was too tenuous for my comfort. What would happen if he couldn’t remember who I was, or if he didn’t want to see me? The fate of the magical world—and maybe even of the nonmagical world, too—might rest on this date. I wasn’t sure where I’d find an intellectual property attorney anywhere else, not one I could get to talk to me without me having to explain the situation up front and pay a hefty retainer. They’d think I was insane. I bit my tongue to keep from telling Gemma to tell him to hurry and call me because I didn’t have a lot of time. That might be a subtle clue that I was after something other than a boyfriend.

  The next afternoon I was surfing the Web in search of information on marketing campaigns for challenging situations when I got an e-mail from Gemma. “Jim said Ethan remembered you, thought you were cute. Jim gave him your number, and Ethan said he’d call sometime.” That was good news, but I was worried about the “sometime” part of the equation. This was no time to deal with the typical male definition of the statement “I’ll call you,” which generally means “sometime before I die, if I think about it.”

  I felt as if I was back in high school, rushing home to check the answering machine to see if he had called, leaping for the phone whenever it rang, calling the machine several times throughout the day to check messages. My roommates must have thought I’d gone stark raving nuts. “I had no idea you were so taken with Ethan,” Gemma remarked at one point. “You should have said something sooner.”

  He finally called on Thursday night. For once Gemma got to the phone before I could—by now Philip had learned to use a telephone, so there were two of us waiting for calls. Her face lit up when she answered, then she put her hand over the receiver and singsonged, “It’s for you! Guess who!”

  Still feeling like I’d reverted to my teens, I grabbed the cordless from her and retreated into the bedroom, shutting the door behind me. “Hi, Ethan,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from shaking.

  “Hi, Katie.” He had a nice voice over the phone, soft and rich. “It’s funny, but I was just about to ask Jim if he thought enough time had gone by so it would be okay for me to ask you out. I wouldn’t want to cause any trouble among friends, but I did want to see you again.”

  Now I felt bad because I really only wanted him for his legal mind. Then again, he was cute. And as far as I knew, he wasn’t prone to zapping things in or out of existence. He was probably the most normal man I knew right now. “I got permission from Marcia,” I said, then wondered if that made it sound like Marcia had no interest in him whatsoever. But if he was wondering about me, it meant he had no interest in Marcia, so he wouldn’t get his feelings hurt.

  “Would you like to get together sometime?” he said.

  I was tempted to be sarcastic and say I’d only asked him to call me so we could talk on the phone for hours, but this was no time for games. I had to be very, very clear. “Sure. When did you have in mind?”

  “Is tomorrow night too soon?”

  “Not at all.” If he’d wanted me to, I would have thrown on a pair of shoes and run to meet him right then.

  “What about dinner after work? I can get away about six. Where do you work?”

  “I work downtown, near City Hall, but I live near Union Square, so anywhere in between could be good for me.”

  “I know this place on MacDougal, not too far from Washington Square. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s good, and it’s a place we can just sit and talk.”

  “Sounds great.”

  He gave me the address, and we arranged to meet at six thirty. Now I just had to find a way to get him talking about work. Judging from the last time I’d seen him, I doubted that would be too difficult. The trick would be getting useful information, and then finding a way to use it. We’d have to hire a lawyer to really accomplish anything, and that might take confessing to the magic situation. I’d have to play it by ear to see if Ethan might be remotely receptive to the idea. At the very least, maybe I’d learn enough to know what steps to take next.

  I reported to Merlin the next day that I’d be meeting with my source, then I left early to prepare myself. Since Ethan thought I was meeting him right after work, I had to strike a balance. I wanted to look nice, but not like I’d put in a lot of special effort. I had to look like I’d just come from work and still managed to look gorgeous. This was why I hated dating. Even the simplest, most casual date could be so very complicated.

  I had a last minute burst of nerves as I rode the subway a short distance across town, then one stop downtown. Why did I think this would work? I might be bright, capable, and in possession of some degree of common sense, but I was lousy at dating. If the fate of the world rested on me having a semisuccessful date, we were in big trouble. I just hoped Jeff the Frog Guy kept his distance tonight.

  Ethan had chosen a restaurant in a spot I couldn’t get to directly via public transportation. This was the first time I’d walked alone after dark since the attack the previous week. I knew I wasn’t really alone. There were very likely magical people nearby, watching my every move. In a way, that made me even more nervous. I didn’t want an audience on a date. I really, really hoped Owen had more important things to do tonight than play bodyguard.

  As I approached the restaurant I caught a glimpse of Sam perched on an awning and relaxed. Sam might tease me later, but he made a good bodyguard.

  Ethan was waiting in front. He smiled when he saw me, which I took as a good sign, for it meant he really did remember which one I was. He was taller than I recalled. When I got closer to him and shook his hand, the top of my head barely reached his shoulder, and I was wearing heels. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long,” I said.

  “You’re right on time. I managed to get away earlier than I expected.”

  He was right that the place was nothing fancy, just a nice little casual restaurant, but it was warm and cozy, and we didn’t have to wait for a table. He helped me out of my jacket, then hung it and his coat on the hook over our booth. We made the usual small talk while studying the menu, then ordered burgers and fries. I liked the idea of someone who didn’t feel the need to put on the dog on a first date, who could just go someplace comfortable. Even if this didn’t work out in a business sense, maybe there would be other benefits after all.

  After we’d ordered, I decided it was time to get to work. “You said you worked in intellectual property law, right?”

  He smiled. “Wow. You really were paying attention. I thought I’d bored everyone to tears. I was such an enthralling conversationalist that night that my date never wanted to see me again.”

  “You weren’t that bad. I actually found it interesting. How often does that really happen, though, where an employee tries to take what they’ve done at a company somewhere else?” It was the best I could come up with to get him talking, short of trying to convince him that legal talk made me hot and bothered.

  “It depends on the industry. We see it a lot in software. There’s a lot of job-hopping, and people take bits of code with them. But then there’s always the argument that they’re just applying things they’ve learned, not using anything they actually developed. The
re’ve been attempts to come up with noncompete clauses, where people can’t go to work for their company’s direct competitor for a certain amount of time after leaving, but that often gets struck down as unfair restraint of trade.”

  The waitress brought our drinks, and he used that as an opportunity to change the subject. “Enough about me,” he said. “What do you do? I don’t think it came up that last time. I was too busy droning on about my work.”

  “My work isn’t nearly as interesting as yours. I’m a secretary. That’s about it.” I stuck to my most boring job description, hoping he wouldn’t ask me more questions.

  “Oh, I don’t know, I bet your life can get pretty interesting, depending on your boss.”

  “I have a good boss, so no real horror stories. Not even any funny ones. Sorry.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I wondered if I’d overplayed the boring angle. He probably felt much like I had with my date the night we’d met, desperately trying to keep the conversation going without much help. But then I realized he wasn’t frowning at me. He was sitting facing the restaurant entrance, and he was frowning at the doorway.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He shook his head like he was trying to clear it, frowned again, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, polished his glasses, then put them back on, blinked, and frowned once more. “Nothing. I just thought I saw something weird, out of the corner of my eye.” He gave a nervous laugh. “It’s been a long week. And I’d better stick to one beer tonight.”

  I turned around and saw Trix and her sprite park ranger—in civilian clothes tonight—standing in the doorway, waiting for a waiter to show them to a table. I turned back around to face him, a queasy feeling forming in my stomach. I’d never seen what their masking illusion looked like, but I’d never seen anyone else react this way to seeing them. Anyone, that is, but me. I remembered that he’d cleaned his glasses that first night when the fairies had come in to the restaurant. Could I have found another immune? “What did you think you saw?” I asked cautiously, trying to sound casually curious even though my heart had migrated to my throat.

  “Nothing,” he insisted, but I stared at him until he sighed and said, “There’s a trick of the light that makes those people look like they’ve got wings. But I only saw it for a second.” He sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than convince me.

  Yep, I recognized that symptom. “Could you excuse me for a second?” I asked.

  I slid out of the booth, then gave Trix a meaningful glance as I passed the table where she and her date had been seated. The restrooms were downstairs, which would make a quick powwow easier.

  Trix joined me less than a minute later. “What’s up?” she asked. “This date seems to be going better than your last one.”

  “The frog guy hasn’t shown up, but the night is still young. And let me guess, you and Ranger Bob are my designated bodyguards for the evening.”

  She giggled, which sounded rather like jingle bells. “Ranger Pippin, actually.”

  “Are you two masked tonight—I mean, would most people see you as human?”

  “Of course. It’s second nature away from work.”

  “Well, then, I may have just found another immune. My date saw you. He thinks he’s going crazy because he’s seeing people with wings.”

  She gasped. “Oh, boy.”

  “So, what do I do? How do I handle this? He’s that intellectual property attorney I mentioned. Do I just tell him right out that magic is real, or do I talk him into coming to the office for a consultation, and then let Mr. Mervyn and the others give him the orientation?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t tell him anything until we’re sure what he is. We’ll need to put him through a few tests, and then we can approach him.” I remembered the weirdness that morning on the subway when they’d tested me, and had a sinking feeling that I was about to have the kind of evening where Naked Frog Guy showing up with his guitar would serve as a nice dose of comic relief.

  She took a cell phone out of her purse, dialed, then said, “It’s Trix. Katie needs to talk to you.”

  She handed the phone to me and a voice said in my ear, “Katie? It’s Rod. What’s up?”

  “You know that attorney I was talking to tonight?” I hoped the office grapevine had done its usual tricks. “Well, I think he’s an immune. He saw Trix’s wings.”

  “Stay there. Try to keep him relaxed and talking. We’ll be there in a moment.” I found it more than a little unnerving that he didn’t have to ask where we were.

  I handed the phone back to Trix. “Looks like we’re about to run some tests.”

  She grinned and giggled again. “Oh, good. That’s always fun!”

  Our meals had just arrived when I got back to the table. Ethan still looked twitchy, darting little glances toward Pippin, like he was trying to figure out what he was seeing. He smiled with great relief when he saw me. We ate and made small talk for a while, and I tried not to show any nervousness about what this testing would entail. If someone used a love spell on my date—even if he wasn’t really a date—I’d be rather annoyed.

  To keep the conversation flowing and to get back to business, I said, “Back to what we were talking about earlier, I’m curious about something. What about people coming up with something brilliant at one company, then taking it with them and starting their own company?”

  “That’s also something we see a lot of in software. People come up with something great, and instead of letting their employer get rich on the idea, they try to get rich for themselves. In those cases, a lot depends on whether the idea grew directly out of a work-related assignment or if it just happened to be something the employee came up with on his own while working for the company.”

  I frowned. This didn’t look good. “What if it was something the employee came up with as part of a work assignment, but his employer wasn’t happy with the direction he took it and declined to market it?”

  “That’s the kind of situation that pays my salary. It takes digging into documentation, doing interviews, that sort of thing, to determine what’s going on. Generally, though, if the development work was done on company time using company resources, the company wins—especially if they have better lawyers.”

  “Is that the side you’re usually on?”

  “Yeah, I’m a tool of the evil corporation.” He laughed. “And now you’re just being polite. There is no way you’re that interested in my work. Or are you planning on stealing something from your boss?”

  “Only Post-it notes and pens,” I said, mustering a laugh of my own. It did sound like we needed a lawyer to deal with this situation. The trick would be finding a way to hire one without him thinking we were insane. If he turned out to be immune and they brought him in on the secret, that might help. “But I really am interested. I haven’t heard of this before. I once thought about law school, but I didn’t know about this field of law.” I crossed my fingers under the table to counteract the lie.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple of men dressed like they’d just come from the gym enter the restaurant and take seats at the bar. That normally wouldn’t have caught my attention—there were already several other similar men sitting at the bar, eating and watching a basketball game on the television suspended from the ceiling—but the two men were Rod and Owen. I wanted to bang my head on the table. It was bad enough faking a date with someone for business purposes without having the man I had a minor crush on be present. Now I felt doubly fake. Even worse, without Owen in the picture, I might manage to be interested in Ethan, and he was a lot closer to being somewhere in the general vicinity of my league. In fact, it looked like we might have more in common than I thought.

  I forced my attention back to Ethan and gamely tried to continue the conversation, even as I dreaded what the magical dynamic duo might come up with as a test. “What happens if a company thinks their employee has stolen something and is using it to compete against them?”

  “F
irst step is we write a nice, official cease and desist letter. In a lot of cases, that scares them into stopping. Most people don’t realize what they’re doing or that it’s wrong. They then just have to modify their product enough to make it be something that’s truly their own. It gets more complicated if there’s a lot of money involved, if the original employer really suffers damages, or if the ex-employee gets defiant.”

  I wondered if a letter would do the trick here. I wasn’t sure how we’d get a case involving stolen magic into the court system. Would that even be a credible threat?

  At that moment, Ethan’s nearly untouched beer disappeared, to be replaced by a bottle of Coke. I suspected most people would still see and even taste the beer. Ethan blinked, went a little pale, picked up the bottle and studied it for a second, then laughed. “I forgot I’d ordered that. But I did say I was only going to have one beer tonight.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to contradict him. He hadn’t ordered it. The waitress had been nowhere near. He was in deep denial, but he’d definitely noticed the change.

  I tried to glance as casually as possible toward the bar area. Rod raised an eyebrow at Owen in an “Okay, you try something” look. Owen bit his lip and frowned in thought, and my stomach knotted in dread. From my experience with his magical creativity, I suspected we were in for something interesting.

  In the blink of an eye our nearly empty dinner dishes and glasses disappeared, to be replaced by a white linen tablecloth covering the previously bare Formica table. On top of the tablecloth were china dishes holding a sinfully rich chocolate dessert. We each had steaming mugs of cappuccino, and a crystal vase in the center of the table held a single red rosebud. I could certainly go for that kind of testing. I had to fight not to shoot a grateful glance in Owen’s direction. He didn’t know much more about me than I knew about him, but it looked like he’d been paying attention. During the first job interview, I’d ordered the cappuccino like it was a rare delicacy, and he knew I carried chocolate in my purse.

  But I couldn’t let myself go hug another man when I was on a date, not even a date generated on dubious pretenses. And speaking of that date, I studied him to see how he reacted. He stared at the table and gulped, then shook his head, took a deep breath, and said, “We must be the millionth customer, or something like that.”