Kiss and Spell (Enchanted, Inc.)

by Swendson, Shanna

  “You’re worried,” Earl noted.

  “I’m not taking any chances.”

  When we reached the park, I paused to observe for a moment. There was none of the understated tension I was used to seeing between Owen and the Council men. Even though Mac was generally more reasonable, he had a way of keeping a constant eye on Owen. All of that was gone now. They just seemed like a group of men hanging out together in the park on a nice fall day. Owen looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in months. I almost hated to ruin it, but I knew that if he looked that relaxed, something was very wrong. I couldn’t imagine what spell would make Owen want to sit in a park and play chess all day. What if they’d wiped him completely and given him a different identity for this world, not just reset him to the guy who’d bought a bookstore to make bookstores cool again? I might not be able to break that spell with a memory or a kiss.

  Gesturing for Earl to stay back, I approached their table. “Oh, there you are!” I said. I was aiming for casual, but my voice sounded high and strained. “I know they say that when the cat’s away, the mice will play, but what happens when the cat is the one away playing?”

  Owen looked up at me, and for a moment I could barely breathe when his face seemed strangely blank, like he didn’t even know me. Then he smiled and blushed guiltily as his eyes focused on me. “Oh, I guess it is late. The store’s not burning down, or anything like that?”

  “No, but people are wondering where you are.”

  “I somehow doubt you’re running rudderless without me.”

  “We might survive for a few more minutes, but after that, anarchy is a real possibility.”

  He grinned. “Okay, I’ll finish this game if you’ll keep the masses from rioting in my absence.” He sounded like Owen, but then he’d sounded like Owen when he was under the spell before, only I didn’t know it then because I didn’t know who I really was. Now, though, I couldn’t be sure. He seemed to recognize me, and there’d been enough familiarity in his tone to indicate that there was some personal relationship there. But was he putting on an act for anyone who might be watching, or had he forgotten who he really was?

  Whatever his status was, I wasn’t about to leave him alone. “Mind if I watch?” I asked, not waiting for his response to sit next to him on the bench.

  “You might be terribly distracting,” he teased. That was a good sign. If they’d reset him, they’d kept his relationship with me.

  “Then maybe I should flutter my eyelashes at Mac,” I said. Mac gave a slight smile but kept his attention focused on the game. I thought Owen might have pulled off the acting job, since we’d been pretending we were under the spell whenever we were in public, but this Mac was way too different from the way he was with self-awareness. They’d definitely zapped him.

  It may have been the longest chess game ever played—at least, it felt like it. All the while, I searched for signs of who Owen might be right now. Was he my Owen, doing an excellent job of playing along, or was he the romantic comedy world’s Owen, who had no idea he was a wizard trapped in an elven prison?

  Finally, Owen won, and the easy laughter from McClusky and Mac at his victory proved to me that they weren’t themselves. I wondered if I should try to revive them, too, but decided to save it for later. We were probably safest if the elves thought their reset had worked, and undoing it immediately would be a dead giveaway.

  Owen said his good-byes to his chess buddies and cheerfully came with me toward the store. Earl stayed just out of sight, so it wasn’t obvious that he was with me. We were just about to cross the street when I looked both ways, as I’d been taught in kindergarten, and I found myself looking one of the gray guys right in the eye.

  There was no doubt that he knew I’d seen him. He reacted, then he moved toward me. I grabbed Owen’s hand and dashed across the street, dodging traffic. When Earl turned to see what was wrong, he, too, couldn’t help but react to the gray guy chasing us.

  They knew we knew, and they weren’t going to stop until they’d made sure we were back under their thrall. I wasn’t about to stand for that. “Run!” I shouted to Earl as I took off, dragging a protesting Owen behind me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  My only plan was to not get caught. That wasn’t a great plan, but I figured I had nothing to lose. The results were likely to be the same, either way, but if I ran, I had a slightly better chance of not being caught and reset. If I didn’t run, it was inevitable.

  “What’s going on? Why are we running?” Owen asked, but to his credit, he didn’t stop running. My urgency must have been contagious.

  “I’ll explain later,” I said, panting.

  With his much longer legs, Earl loped easily ahead of us, clearing a path down the sidewalk. We needed enough distance from our pursuers for us to duck inside a building and hide before they noticed where we’d gone.

  A glance over my shoulder told me that I didn’t have nearly enough room to maneuver. They were closing fast, and I was sure others would arrive soon. I needed to act now.

  We reached a greengrocer’s, and I got an idea. This was a foot chase in a world out of a movie. So, like in the movies, I should tip things over in my pursuer’s path. The way ahead of me seemed to have been designed for such a move.

  I kicked the front legs out from under a bin of oranges, sending them crashing to the sidewalk, then knocked over the adjacent bin of apples. For a moment, I felt bad about messing up the shop like that, but then I remembered that this place wasn’t real. The fruit was probably an illusion. I just hoped it was real enough to slow down the gray guys.

  I didn’t take the time to look, though. After knocking over a rack to block the sidewalk entirely, I dragged Owen toward a nearby sidewalk café and turned a table onto its side so that its umbrella not only blocked the sidewalk but also obscured the view of what happened beyond it. Then we darted around the next corner.

  The gray guys came around the corner, and now they weren’t just chasing us. They sent magic at us. I felt its approach but wasn’t sure what the spell was supposed to do. I instinctively used the protection spell Rod and Owen had taught me to block it.

  When their spell didn’t work, our pursuers kept up the chase. “Earl!” I warned, but he didn’t seem too worried. He merely turned back, waved his free hand, and there was a huge burst of light. He then shouted, “This way!” and pulled us into a narrow passage between buildings. We ran down a set of stairs leading to a basement door and huddled at the foot of the stairwell.

  “What’s going on here?” Owen asked, looking truly alarmed.

  “I’ll explain in a moment, when we’re safe,” I said.

  He reached for the handle of the basement door. “Wouldn’t it be better to hide inside?”

  Earl slapped his hand away. “Not now.”

  I hardly dared breathe while we waited for discovery. I thought I heard footsteps. Had they followed us into the passage? Finally, Earl cautiously raised himself enough to peer out of the stairwell. When he was satisfied that the gray guys were gone, he opened the basement door and gestured for us to enter.

  Earl had formed a magical light after the door closed behind us. Owen jumped back from the light, startled, then asked, “What is that? And why didn’t we open the door earlier?”

  “I didn’t know how long my blast would obscure their vision. They wouldn’t see us in the stairwell from the street, but they might have noticed the door opening.”

  “There was no one there,” Owen protested. Then he looked around the empty shell of the basement. “What is this place? And what’s going on?” He sounded less alarmed than most people might under the circumstances, but more alarmed than I was used to hearing from Owen.

  It would have been pleasant if I could have snapped him out of it with a kiss, but that hadn’t worked on me the last time, and I doubted either of us were really in a kissing mood at the moment. I also wasn’t in the mood for trying to explain anything. “Check your pockets,” I said. I suspected that unde
r the circumstances, he’d be more willing to believe himself than me.

  “What do my pockets have to do with this?”

  “Just check. Please.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded square of paper. I held my breath while he unfolded it and read it. If it didn’t work, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a lot of memories of him, but picking the one that was a surefire hit would be a challenge. As he read, he blinked, and I couldn’t tell what had happened.

  Because I couldn’t bear to wait for the outcome and I couldn’t risk not restoring him, I said shakily, “On our first real date, the restaurant caught fire. Then there was the time I fell through the ice in the Central Park rink. Oh, and you had pet dragons.” That had to either jolt him back to himself or convince him I was insane.

  He gave me a funny look, then his eyes focused and I could tell he was my Owen again. He swayed, and I rushed forward to catch him.

  He fell into my arms, but more out of relief than because he was fainting from shock. “Oh, thank you,” he breathed in my ear as he held me.

  “You’re you again?” I asked, just to be sure.

  “Yeah, wizard and all. What happened?”

  “Something must have gone wrong with last night’s operation,” Earl said. “Maybe they sensed the illusion our spy used. It seems like they’ve gone around resetting all the prisoners.”

  “We’re now fugitives. We’ve entered the lurking in basements and attics phase of the resistance movement,” I added. “I was afraid they might do something more drastic than just resetting me again if they caught me, since they thought they’d already got me once.”

  “How did you avoid it?” Owen asked.

  “I think it was a mix of my magic being weak and me shielding it slightly.”

  “Good work! So, now what, boss?”

  My legs were shaking from our desperate escape, so I sank to sit on the floor, and the two guys joined me. “I guess we’ll have to start all over again, waking people up, and we’ll need a new plan,” I said. “That will be more complicated while we’re fugitives.”

  “I’m not sure we should wake everyone,” Owen said.

  “I take it you’re not going to revive Mac right away?”

  “I’m not going to revive anyone right away. We need to lie low.”

  “I just wish we could find a way to get word back home. We don’t seem to be able to get to their portal. It’s too bad we can’t make one of our own.”

  “Maybe we could,” Owen said.

  “Between worlds?” Earl asked, his eyebrows rising.

  “Not big enough to send us, but a message, maybe. If I can aim it properly, we could send it where we’re sure our people would find it. It’ll take a lot of power, so we’ll need to revive enough people.”

  “You know how to do that?” Earl asked.

  “I’ve never tried it, but I know the theory.” Owen didn’t sound confident enough to reassure me.

  “If the illusion was enough to get their attention, wouldn’t that kind of power be noticeable?” I asked.

  “It depends,” Earl said. “There’s a lot of magic going on here all the time, just keeping this place running. What they noticed was magic they didn’t expect to be there. If we can hide among their magic, we might get away with it.”

  The two of them looked at me, and I realized they were waiting for a decision from their leader. “Do you have any other ideas?” I asked.

  “I don’t think Mac’s prison riot would help much,” Owen said.

  “And it doesn’t look like we can get through a portal, ourselves. Sending out a message may be our only hope, and we don’t have a lot of time to waste.” I took a deep breath, then said as forcefully as I could manage, “Let’s do it. How many people do you think you’ll need?”

  “At least five. More if we can swing it.”

  I turned to Earl. “Do you think you can get that many without being noticed?”

  “I should be able to. With any luck, the memories we’ve all got hidden will have already done the trick, but I’ll go round people up.”

  “Be careful,” I warned. “You’re a known fugitive.”

  “I’ll get one person and then that should have a ripple effect.”

  “We could try working it some from our end,” I said.

  Earl shook his head. “No, you’re the one who’s public enemy number one, the one person the whammy didn’t affect. They’ll be out to get you. It’s probably safest if you stay put for a while.” He checked his watch and said, “I’ll meet you back here in two hours.”

  When Earl was gone, Owen put his arm around my shoulders and said, “I did thank you for rescuing me, didn’t I?”

  “It might have come up,” I replied, unable to hide my smile.

  “Well, you were incredible. Thank you.” He bent and kissed me, and I sighed with relief to have my Owen back.

  When we ended the kiss, I leaned against him and asked, “Do you think you can really do it?”

  “I’ve got to.”

  “You do know that needing to do it doesn’t necessarily mean you can, right?”

  “I’ve read some books about it, and I’ve even done some study of elven magic. The trick will be getting enough power. It’ll take as many elves as Earl can round up, and possibly you, too.” He paused before adding, “It’ll probably drain you entirely.”

  Forcing bravery I wasn’t sure I felt into my voice, I said, “We knew it was going to happen eventually, anyway. It might as well be for a good cause, and I’d rather get back to the real world than be able to make glowy balls of light. Even if that is kind of cool,” I added wistfully.

  He turned and kissed me lightly on the temple. “I’m sorry.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m cut out to be magical. I think I’m a pretty great immune, but let’s face it, I was a mediocre wizard.”

  “That’s not true at all. You caught on very quickly. You only started having problems when your power ran below a certain level. If you had full power like a real wizard, you’d be formidable. Your technique was excellent—even if it was a mix of traditional magic and whatever it was your grandmother was teaching you.”

  With a soft sigh, I settled my head against his shoulder. “I never thought I’d ever say this, but I wish she was here now.”

  He chuckled and said, “Yeah, it would be interesting to see what she’d do in this situation.”

  “She’d probably take one of the gray guys hostage and work her way up the chain of command.” I hesitated, then said, “You know …”

  “If the portal idea doesn’t work, we may consider that.”

  As confident as he sounded about being able to open a small, perfectly aimed portal, I started thinking about every movie or TV show I’d ever seen involving a kidnapping so I could get ideas for the best way to take one of the guards hostage. We’d have to find a way to neutralize their powers, or else our hostage could put the whammy on us even as we took him prisoner—maybe even while he was a prisoner. I supposed I could always burn through my remaining magic supply so at least one of us wouldn’t be affected, but it would be hard to convince Owen of that. His stance made sense in that, to him, being immune to magic had been like a punishment, and getting his powers back had come as a great relief. He couldn’t imagine that I might prefer to go back to what was normal for me.

  *

  I tried not to look at my watch too often, since that made time pass more slowly, but we were getting awfully close to that two-hour mark, and there was no sign of Earl. I didn’t say anything about it until it was five minutes past the time he was supposed to have returned. “Earl’s late,” I remarked, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

  “He may have run into something.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “It may not be something bad. He may just be taking extra precautions.”

  “You’re probably right. Two hours wasn’t long enough. I’d rather him be late and stay sa
fe. Let’s wait longer.”

  Owen conjured lunch for us, and that passed some time. When another hour had passed, I said, “Okay, I’m officially worried. What should we do?”

  “You’re the one in charge.”

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “We don’t have to maintain that pretense now. The Council guys are still enchanted and the elves aren’t here, so you don’t have to act like the good little soldier.”

  “I’m not acting. You’re legitimately in charge. They agreed, and you’ve done a good job. What do you think we should do?”

  I clenched and unclenched my hands, thinking. This was more responsibility than I was used to having. Sure, I theoretically ran a department, but Perdita was the only person who reported to me. I was generally more of an assistant type who was surrounded by experts.

  Thinking of Perdita gave me an idea, though. “It’s probably safest to assume that something happened to Earl,” I said. “Fortunately, we didn’t put all our eggs in one basket. We’ll carry out the plan ourselves. If they got to Perdita, she should be easy to revive, since we didn’t even have to try the first time. She’s got a good network and should be able to round up enough people to make your portal. If Earl is okay and was just delayed, he’ll know we had to act, and he knows to check in with Perdita.”

  “So, to Perdita it is,” he said, standing and offering me a hand to help me up. “Maybe we can find a path through the building that will take us out far from where we entered.”

  “And let’s hope that they’ve given up on finding us around here,” I added.

  There was a door on the other side of the empty room, so we started there. The door led to an interior stairway. The door at the top of the stairs opened without a key into another nearly featureless space. We made our way down the block, treading carefully on the incomplete floors. When we reached the end, Owen looked out the windows on the side of the building. “I don’t see any of the gray guys, but that doesn’t mean some of the other people out there aren’t guards who might be looking for us.”