Enchanted, Inc

by Shanna Swendson

  The intruder then gave up on magic and went for physical force, shoving me roughly away from him. He was bigger than I was, so the force carried me across the hallway to hit the opposite wall. There was an audible thunk as my temple smacked into the wall. I slumped to the ground, dazed.

  Why wasn't anyone coming? I thought I'd shouted loud enough to wake the dead.

  But then the interloper flew back against the other wall, as though someone had thrown him. He remained pinned there, his feet several inches off the floor. He no longer looked like he thought no one could see him.

  I turned to see Owen standing in the corridor, his face flushed and his hair mussed, like he'd run the moment he heard my shout. Good old superhero friend Owen. But he wasn't the sweet, shy guy I'd come to know in the past week. He looked like someone I wouldn't want to mess with. If I'd thought the hint of restrained danger he'd shown earlier was sexy, now he was downright hot. I understood why heroines in superhero movies were always swooning into their unitard-wearing heartthrobs'

  arms after being rescued. It wasn't that they were shrinking violets or weak girly-girls.

  It was just that seeing a man do something so extraordinary and supernatural to save you has a way of making your knees go weak in a very pleasant way. I'd always heard power was an aphrodisiac, but I hadn't considered the possible implications of that when working for a magical company.

  The guy pinned to the wall seemed to try to do something to counter whatever it was Owen had done to him. He muttered something in a foreign language, waved his hands, and even twitched his nose, and I felt the tingle of energy that came with magic use, but it didn't do him much good. He remained stuck there.

  "Who are you?" Owen asked him in a voice that was soft, yet full of power.

  The man opened his mouth to speak, as if compelled to do so, but then he struggled to clamp his mouth shut again. Owen held out his hand, and the packet of papers that had been under the guy's jacket flew to him. The guy continued to struggle.

  Owen waved his hand casually, and the man slumped to the ground in a daze.

  Now I thought I understood what Rod had meant about keeping Owen shy for safety. The intruder was panting and sweating with effort, while Owen didn't have so much as a bead of moisture on his forehead. I could see where you wouldn't want someone with that kind of power to have a big ego or a sense that anyone owed him anything. If he got it into his head that he wanted to take over the world, it wouldn't be easy to stop him.

  Wouldn't you know it, I'd go and develop a thing for a guy who was way out of my league, in so very many ways. A super powerful wizard didn't really fit into my lifestyle. I could just imagine taking him home to meet my folks. I'd have enough trouble explaining my job to them. What could Owen possibly say about his job that wouldn't send my dad off to get his shotgun to scare this weirdo away from his daughter? It would be even worse if I'd inherited my magical immunity from my parents. Then the last thing I needed to do was let anyone magical into my nonwork life. Not that Owen would have the slightest interest in going to Texas and meeting my folks. Hadn't they said during my interview that I came from a very nonmagical place?

  The department door opened and Sam flew inside, followed by a crew of large men.

  "Took you long enough," Owen said, sounding more like his usual self.

  "Aw, I knew you had things under control, boss," Sam said as he landed in front of the intruder. "Take him away, boys."

  "Hold him in Security. We'll have someone talk to him later," Owen directed.

  Sam saluted with one wing, then flew off after the security group that was levitating the petrified body down the hallway. Once they were gone, the sense of power and energy that had filled the hallway faded away. I tried to get up, but a hand on my shoulder pushed me back down. I looked up to see Owen leaning over me, his face full of concern. Then he turned around and said, "Everyone, back to work." I noticed people disappearing into labs up and down the corridor.

  "Are you okay?" he asked me softly.

  "I'm fine, really."

  He shook his head. "No, I don't think you are. We need to get someone to take a look at you. And I suspect the boss will want to talk to you."

  "The boss. You mean Merlin?"

  "Yes, Merlin."

  The fact that I was talking like I'd had a couple of glasses of champagne on an empty stomach was a pretty good sign I wasn't okay, but I wasn't sure I wanted to deal with Merlin in this state, and I was definitely sure I didn't want to deal with Owen right now. Dealing with Owen without making a total fool of myself required the ability to think straight, something I didn't have at the moment.

  "Okay, I'm not so fine. Just a bit dizzy. There's a hospital down the street, though."

  He got an arm around me and helped me to my feet. "That's not necessary. Mr.

  Mervyn is a healer. He can see to you while we talk about what happened here."

  "I'm not magical, remember? Immune. Magic healing won't work on me."

  He chuckled as he draped my left arm across his shoulders and circled my waist with his right arm. That felt really nice, a little too nice. When was the last time a man had put his arm around me like that, whether or not it was for romantic reasons?

  "Not all healing is magical. Mr. Mervyn was a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance."

  "I'm about to find out what's going on here, why they brought him back, aren't I?" I asked as we made our way slowly to the turret escalator.

  "Yes, I imagine you are."

  Merlin/Mr. Mervyn met us at the top of the stairs. "Is she hurt?" he asked.

  "I think so," Owen responded. "She hit her head."

  "Get her to my office. The suspect's in custody?"

  "Security has him."

  Soon I was deposited on a soft sofa. There were more voices in the room now, but all I noticed was Owen's hand gripping mine. "I don't know how he got in, but if Katie hadn't spotted him ..."

  "What was he trying to steal?" Merlin's voice came from across the room.

  "Our research on the Idris situation."

  "Then he's definitely worried, or he suspects we are." This time, Merlin's voice came from nearby. Something cool touched my forehead. It smelled good, minty and flowery. "Here, rest this against the lump. It should take down the swelling."

  I opened my eyes to see Merlin kneeling beside me. Take away the business suit and put him in robes studded with stars, then grow his beard out to be long and pointy instead of neatly trimmed, and he was right out of a picture book about King Arthur I'd had as a child. "Merlin," I said. I thought I'd been musing silently, but I must have spoken out loud. "Mind if I call you Merlin?"

  "Not at all, dear. Now, tell me what you're seeing."

  "I see you, and Owen. And your office."

  He held a hand in front of my face. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

  I squinted at the wavering image. "Two. I think."

  He exchanged a look with Owen, then the two of them helped me lie down on the sofa. Merlin put a pillow under my head, while Owen took off my shoes and covered me with a light blanket that I didn't remember being there.

  Merlin knelt beside me again. "Katie, I believe you have a mild concussion. You need to rest awhile. I'll give you a cordial that should prevent a very bad headache, and the poultice will keep you from swelling and bruising too badly."

  He went away for a moment, then came back and lifted my head gently as he put a small glass to my lips. "Now, drink." I obeyed, and a tangy, sweet liquid flowed down my throat. I sank gratefully back against the pillows.

  I didn't fall asleep, but I let myself drift as the voices in the room began speaking to each other, apparently ignoring my presence. They sounded like they were having an emergency meeting. It had to be a meeting about the intruder, which must have had something to do with whatever was threatening the company enough that they'd brought Merlin out of retirement to deal with it. I tried to listen, even though I kept drifting away.

  A voice I
didn't recognize asked, "How did an intruder get in anyway? I thought that area was secured."

  "It is secured," Owen protested. "All I can think is that the intruder tailed someone else into the building and into the department, using an invisibility spell." He groaned and added, "I'd just had Wiggram Bookbinder in, selling me a rare codex. The intruder probably followed him. Or, as desperate as Wig seemed to be, it's entirely possible that the whole thing was a setup to get the spy inside. If Katie hadn't been there to see past that spell, we'd be in big trouble."

  "Maybe you'd better meet with your shady sources somewhere other than in a highly secured department," the other voice said, but then he seemed to swallow his argument before he got really wound up.

  I soon learned why. "Gentlemen, I believe the real issue at hand is that Mr. Idris has been reduced to espionage," Merlin said, his voice sounding grim. I could only imagine what his face must have looked like. It would be enough to shut anyone up.

  "But why?" one of the other voices asked.

  "He wants to know what we're planning to do about him," Owen said.

  "What are we planning?" another voice asked.

  "That's the problem," Owen said with a sigh. "We don't have much to go on. If he'd managed to get his hands on these notes, he would have laughed at how ineffectual we are. All we know is what he was working on when we dismissed him. There's no way of telling what he's doing now until we find a copy of a spell. Even then, we don't have any control over what he does. All we can do is find a way to counter it."

  "It's a little late to worry about that, isn't it?" the other voice asked. "We've heard he's already got some spells out there. They're not mass market, but he's got customers. Whatever he's doing has been unleashed on the world, and we don't know what damage will be done before we can develop a counterspell."

  "Perhaps some of our panic is premature," Merlin said softly. "We don't know who might buy or use these spells. All we know is what he wanted to market through us, and that our corporate leadership found his ideas distasteful. There's a very good chance that the general magical population will find his ideas equally distasteful."

  "But what do we do if people buy and use these spells? Judging by what we saw him doing here, we know his work is dangerous. I can't begin to imagine his work would be any less dangerous without our constraints."

  "We need more time," Owen said softly, his voice full of despair. "We're doing everything we can, but it's not enough."

  I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. As powerful as he was, it had to be hard to acknowledge that doing everything he could wasn't good enough. I also didn't like the idea of a rogue sorcerer selling bootleg spells, or whatever this guy was doing.

  Unfortunately, I knew next to nothing about magic, so there wasn't much I could do to help.

  Or was there? I did know a thing or two about business, and this seemed to be as much a business problem as it was a magic problem. In fact, although this business seemed like it belonged to another universe, it wasn't that different from a situation I recalled from my days at the feed-and-seed. Our family had been running that business for nearly a century, as long as the town had been around. Not only had we been supplying the current generation of farmers and ranchers, but we'd supplied their fathers and grandfathers. A few years ago a national chain store had opened in a nearby town, offering lower prices. Farming is a low-margin business at the best of times, so those low prices were tempting to our customers. We just had to remind them why they'd been coming to us all those years, and why that new store wasn't the same.

  Holding the poultice pack against my head, I sat up very carefully and waited for the room to steady itself before I said, "It seems to me that your main problem at this point is that you have competition, regardless of what your competition is offering.

  Make him compete on your level, and you can reduce the impact he might have."

  All the men in the room turned to look at me, and I felt suddenly very self-conscious. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and continued to play dead, but it was too late for regrets, so I plunged on while they were too stunned to say anything. "I don't really know the situation, so maybe I'm missing something, but from what y'all have said, it sounds like one of your former employees went into business for himself and now may be offering some less pleasant alternatives to your products."

  "That's a very acute and concise summation of the situation, Katie," Merlin said.

  "Okay, good. Thanks. Well, anyway, until you've got a way to stop the less pleasant effects of what he's doing, it seems to me that what you need to do is get people to choose your spells over his."

  They all looked at one another and nodded. Merlin and Owen both smiled. "How do we do that?" one of the others asked me.

  "Have you ever tried marketing?" Most of them looked blank, but one of the men grinned.

  "Marketing is basically letting people know what you have to sell and getting that product to the right people," he said.

  Merlin still looked blank, but he was new to this century. "Surely you've seen ads," I said. "Have you ever watched TV?"

  Faces lit up all the way around the table, and I could see comprehension dawning in their eyes. "Those ads tell you why you're better off buying this car or shampoo or soap than you would be if you bought the other kind. That's based on market research, which is finding out what your customers are like—what do they need, what concerns them, what do they prefer? Then you create an ad that addresses those things, letting your customers know that what you're offering them is exactly whatthey need,

  that it will solve their problems, and that you're the only one who can do so."

  "So we tell our customers why they should choose our spells?" Merlin asked. He looked like a little kid who's just figured out how the multiplication table works and can't wait to multiply everything in sight. If I wasn't careful, MSI would be running a Super Bowl ad soon.

  "Exactly! You might not want to come right out and say that your competitor is evil and his spells will do harm, but you do want to let people know why what you're selling is their best bet."

  "If we can put a big dent in his sales, make it harder for him to get his spells into the market, we may be able to buy enough time to come up with a counterspell," Owen mused. "I like it. Great idea, Katie."

  "So, we'll try marketing," Merlin said, rubbing his hands together. "How do we do that?"

  "Let me guess, you don't have a marketing department," I said. Of course they didn't, not if I'd had to define the concept of marketing for them. "How have you made sales in the past? How have you let customers know what's available?"

  They all looked at one another. "We have a sales department," the man who'd defined marketing said. He looked like a sales guy, not the kind wearing a plaid sport coat, but the kind who could convince someone to spend several thousand dollars on a diamond ring because otherwise they wouldn't be investing properly in their relationship. He was as good-looking as Owen, but in a slick, plastic way that I didn't find attractive. Come to think of it, he looked like a Ken doll brought to life. At this

  company, I wouldn't rule out the possibility. "The salesbeings work with the retailers to let them know what we have available, and the retailers let their customers know.

  There's been no alternative to our commercially produced spells, so we haven't needed to do much in the way of marketing."

  "Not on a widespread level," Owen added. "There are a few niche products, and there's always been kitchen witchery, homemade spells people develop to suit their individual needs, but for centuries magical people have known that MSI spells are the best way to go. We take care of all that necessary and sometimes messy and dangerous trial and error."

  "Could you do this marketing for us, Katie?" Merlin asked.

  Oh boy. Now I was in over my head. I'd been responsible for marketing the family store, but even in our worst crises with competition, that had amounted to putting ads in the local weekly paper and mailing the occasional fl
yer to our customer list.

  My job as a corporate marketing assistant had taught me very little aside from the process of getting brochures produced. But I had taken some marketing courses for my degree, and it seemed I was better qualified than anyone else in this crazy company. Magic immunity or not, I appeared to have my own brand of sorcery.

  Maybe I wasn't so far out of Owen's league after all.

  "I guess so," I said. "It's not going to be a major campaign, but anything is better than what you have—or haven't—been doing up to this point. The way I see it, the main thing you'll want to get across is what Owen said, that you've been the source for spells for centuries. How can anyone else compare? You can brag about how safe your spells are, and how they're extensively tested for effectiveness. Get in a subtle message that no newcomer can offer that, so naturally everyone will want to go with the tried-and-true provider instead of the upstart."

  "Wonderful!" Merlin said. "You'll work with Mr. Hartwell here. He heads up our sales department." The plastic man stepped forward and shook my hand.

  "But you'll start tomorrow. For now, Katie must rest," Merlin continued. "Back to your offices." He all but chased the others away. Owen looked like he was«about to put up a fuss, but a glare from Merlin apparently changed his mind. Once they were gone, Merlin returned to the sofa where I sat and took my chin in his fingers. He studied me for a long moment, then smiled. "You'll be fine. How is your headache?"

  I'd forgotten I was supposed to have a headache. "It's gone, I think. It's just a bit sore where I bumped it."

  "Excellent. We can't thank you enough for stopping that intruder."

  "I take it he was supposed to be invisible."

  "So we were very fortunate that you were there. We don't often have need for verification services in the research department, though I believe we should start incorporating immunes into our security force to guard against future intrusions."

  "Who is this Idris guy, anyway?" I asked.

  He sat next to me on the sofa and clasped his hands together over his knees. "I've never met the gentleman. It was because of him that I was brought back. But from what I understand, he was on Owen's staff. Quite brilliant, but not entirely ethical.