In the wrong hands, it could be devastating. The victim won't ever realize anything's wrong, unlike with that other spell."
"And if it works as advertised, it means none of our marketing messages are going to be very effective," I said. "We can no longer stand on the position that our spells work and have been thoroughly tested." I think I was more upset about this development than I had been about being attacked. It made weeks of work practically useless.
They all turned to me, and I wished I hadn't spoken. "Katie, do you have any ideas?"
Merlin asked.
I shook my head. "Sorry, but I can't think of anything right now. It seems like our real differentiator is that our spells can't be used to do harm. The people who don't want to do harm or use other people won't be interested anyway, and nothing we say will influence the people who do want to use others. 'Just say no' wasn't very effective for Nancy Reagan, and I doubt it will help us much."
I was sure I saw disappointment in Merlin's eyes, and I felt bad for letting him down.
I'd let myself get a big head from my earlier successes and had managed to forget that I was a small-town girl with a business degree and a year working as a marketing assistant. "I'm sorry," I said after a while. "I'll have to think about it."
"Please do," Merlin said, and I fought to blink back tears. I turned away from Merlin to see Owen looking at me with compassion in his eyes. I realized he was in pretty much the same boat I was, where all his previous successes meant next to nothing now.
"How long until you have an effective counterspell that will render this one meaningless?" Merlin asked him.
"I don't know. I'm not sure we ever will. As I said, this was the spell he was working on when he left, and we've been looking for ways to counter it ever since then, yet we still haven't come up with anything. I've been over all of his source material. I've taken that spell apart and looked at it inside out and upside down. I'm afraid it's airtight."
"No spell is perfect. You can find a weakness." This was a whole new side to Merlin that I hadn't seen before. Until now, although I knew intellectually that this was the Merlin, it hadn't really sunk in that this was the man who had put Arthur on the throne, who had been instrumental in all those great deeds they still told stories about. I could see that legend in the man who sat at the head of the table now, and it was rather intimidating.
Owen flinched, a flush spreading upward from his collar, and he nodded. "I'll keep at it."
"Minerva?"
She shrugged. "Still nothing. I'm not getting any portents, one way or another, which means the situation is still in flux. We can influence the outcome."
"We'll get the sales force out on the streets, with verifiers to see where and how this stuff is selling," Mr. Hartwell said. "I can even call in some old debts and get customer names, so we know who to track." He must not have wanted Merlin coming down on him, so he was being proactive with the information.
"Good," Merlin said curtly. "If he succeeds here, then we know he'll continue trying.
We can notallow this to succeed. We had these problems in my time, and it nearly tore Britain apart. I've read enough of the history I've missed to know the same thing has happened here, and fairly recently." That caught my attention. Had there been other magical wars the rest of the world didn't know about? Then maybe this situation wasn't as dire as I'd feared, since we'd all clearly survived. I made a mental note to go back to reading those books Owen had loaned me.
"But this is the first challenge we've faced that's come in business form," Merlin continued. "That gives it the slightest aura of legitimacy, which makes it appealing to those who might be wavering between light and dark. Few of those would sign up for the side of evil in a magical war, but give them a legitimate-looking product, and they'll be tempted. Corrupt them a little bit, and it's easy to corrupt them further. We must stop this now." I felt a surge of magical charge at his words and shivered.
Okay, so maybe the situation was as dire as I feared.
I racked my brain for a way I could help, but I was getting nothing. I couldn't see a
"Don't do bad magic" campaign going over too well. But what else could we do if we couldn't imply that the competition had shoddy spells? As I'd said, the people who'd be into this sort of thing already knew this was bad and didn't care.
I rewound the meeting to that point in my brain, searching for anything I might be able to use. Something Owen had said triggered a vague memory of something recent that hadn't been important or meaningful enough to think about at the time.
But now it just might do the trick.
I was almost afraid to bring it up. What if they'd already considered, and then rejected, this idea long ago? Or worse, what if they'd considered and tried it, and it hadn't worked? It was so obvious, but I'd learned that what was obvious to me wasn't always obvious to people who for all intents and purposes lived in an entirely different world.
Oh hell, it was worth a shot. I cleared my throat. "I might have an idea."
sixteen
Every head in the room turned to stare at me, and for a second I thought I should have kept my mouth shut. "You may have already thought of this, but I haven't heard anyone bring it up yet." I licked my lips and wished I had a glass of water handy for wetting my suddenly dry throat. "My world has its own powers, you know. And like magic, some of them can be used for good or for evil. For example, lawyers."
I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn't going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. "What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?" Mr. Hartwell asked.
"Lawyers can stop just about anything. Tie it up in court, and nobody gets anywhere for ages. That could buy you the time you need to come up with a better way of fighting this. I'm no expert, but you might have an intellectual property case."
"What's that?" Owen asked. The flicker of hope in his eyes gave me the courage to keep going.
"Anything an employee develops while working here belongs to the company, not to the employee. Surely you have some language to that effect in employment agreements."
Owen nodded. "Especially in R and D."
"The point of that is to keep an employee from developing something on company time, using company resources, then selling it himself. And that seems to be what Idris is doing. He's taking something he developed here and using it to create his own products. You might be able to make him stop that."
"How do we do that?" Merlin asked.
"I'm not sure, but I may know someone who would know. I'll have to check. It could take a couple of days." I was going out on a limb here, basing my grand idea for saving the world on a blind date my roommate had once had, but this situation sounded exactly like the one he'd described in his dinner table conversation.
"Please do check, then report as soon as possible."
The meeting broke up, and we all went back to our respective offices with our individual tasks. I'd felt exhilarated before, when my proposal for a marketing plan had been accepted, but now I was scared. What if it didn't work? These were awfully big stakes to hinge on something so vague.
I decided to wait until I got home to talk to Marcia. The three of us sat around the dinner table that night, still talking about the results of my Friday night date. "I don't know what you did to him, Katie, but he wouldn't even look at me today," Gemma said with a laugh.
"Oh, he's just worried she'll be hurt if she hears he doesn't want to call her again,"
Marcia said.
"Sorry that one didn't work out for you, hon. We'll have to try again," Gemma said, reaching over to pat me on the shoulder. "Maybe Philip has a friend."
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 whil
e 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 wasthe 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. There'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 rest-rooms were downstairs, which would make a quick powwow easier.
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